ARTS COUNCIL NORWAY

n e w s

B I S A / Potent Presences

In 2008, the Asia-Europe Museums Network or ASEMUS organized the exhibition Self and Other: Portraits from Asia and Europe. The project started in Japan at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka and travelled to the National Museum of Art in the same city, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama and the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History. Brian Durrans, advisor of the British Museum, explains that in Japan, the exhibitions “outline the complex history of mutual perception through the medium of visual representations” between Asian and European peoples. It was contemplated at the outset that variations on the same theme would be presented in places like London, Stockholm, and Manila. Mr. Durrans continues that this was “one of the more ambitious of several core projects organized within ASEMUS…(which was) established in 2001 on the initiative of ASEF, the Asia-Europe Foundation.”

The Manila contribution will be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila and will be titled Bisa: Potent Presences. Its premise spins from the Filipino word for potency, efficacy, charm, enchantment, specter, and prowess that is linked up with talismanic culture as well as cognate to the Bahasa Malayu for ability, the possibility of doing. The exhibition, therefore, dwells on agency, the will of the self to relate to the other in a post-colonial context. The latter is salient because the Philippines has had the longest engagement with western-style painting and its modality of image making. When the Portuguese mariner Magellan set foot on the archipelago in 1521, he presented the image of the Christ Child to the chieftain’s wife; and three centuries later, the first school of drawing in Asia opened under the auspices of a homegrown miniaturist painter. It is this lasting and enduring liaison with image in a post-colonial scheme that gives the Philippine segment its distinction and the various guises of affection that the representation of self and other, conceived in the plural sense of presences, generate.

This ambitious project was conceived by artist Tamsyn Challenger in response to the brutal murder and rape of more than 400 women over a decade in the US border town of Ciudad Juárez and the region of Chihuahua in Mexico. Some 200 exceptional artists including Tracey Emin, Paula Rego, Maggi Hambling and Humphrey Ocean have each painted one of the murdered women, confronting us with and safeguarding in our memory the dead and disappeared. The exhibition raises important questions about the capacity of art to represent tragedy and commemorate the dead, as well as the potential for art to affect an audience and the collective nature of grief. The exhibition is curated by Ellen Mara De Wachter, a curator and writer based in London.

Jet Pascua is participating in this project which will be on exhibit at the Shoreditch Town Hall Basement until November 28.

No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents

Z.A.K For
No Soul For Sale 2010
Friday 14 May 2010, 10.00–00.00
Saturday 15 May 2010, 10.00–00.00
Sunday 16 May 2010, 10.00–18.00
To celebrate Tate Modern's 10th anniversary, the gallery will host No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents. For this free arts festival, Tate Modern is inviting 70 of the world's most innovative independent art spaces to take over the Turbine Hall. The festival will fill the iconic space, as well as the Starr Auditorium, with an eclectic mix of cutting-edge arts events, performances, music and film on 14-16 May 2010.

The gallery will stay open until midnight on Friday 14 and Saturday 15 May for free late night performances by artists and musicians including Cosey Fanni Tutti, DJ Spooky, Jeffrey Lewis, Kaffe Matthews, Long Meg, patten, Martin Creed and his Band, Skin Jobs, Temperatures, and Thurston Moore and Eva Prinz.

No Soul For Sale is a festival that brings together the most exciting non-profit centres, alternative institutions, artists' collectives and underground enterprises from around the world. The participants are encouraged to show whatever they choose, be it art, performance, video, publications, or simply themselves. Neither a fair nor an exhibition, No Soul For Sale is a convention of individuals and groups who devote their energies to art they believe in, beyond the limits of the market and other logistical constraints – it is a celebration of the independent forces that animate contemporary art. The festival is an exercise in coexistence: organisations exhibit alongside one another without partitions or walls, creating a pop-up art village.

No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents is curated by Cecilia Alemani, Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, and produced by Tate Modern. The first edition of No Soul For Sale took place in June 2009 at X initiative in the former Dia Center for the Arts in New York.

Independent arts organisations taking part in No Soul For Sale include: 2nd Cannons Publications (Los Angeles), 98weeks research project (Beirut), Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul), Arrow Factory (Beijing), ArtHub Asia (Shanghai/Bangkok/Beijing), Artis - Contemporary Israeli Art Fund (New York/Tel Aviv), Artists Space (New York), Artspeak (Vancouver), Auto Italia South East (London), Ballroom (Marfa), Barbur (Jerusalem), Black Dogs (Leeds), Capacete Entertainment (Rio de Janeiro), casa tres patios (Medellín), Cinématèque de Tanger (Tanger), cneai= (Paris-Chatou), Collective Parasol (Kyoto), Dispatch (New York), e-flux (Berlin), Elodie Royer and Yoann Gourmel - 220 jours (Paris), Embassy (Edinburgh), Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado (Lisbon), FLUXspace (Philadelphia), FormContent (London), Galerie im Regierungsviertel / Forgotten Bar Project (Berlin), Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila), Hell Gallery (Melbourne), Hermes und der Pfau (Stuttgart), i-cabin (London), Intoart (London), K48 Kontinuum (New York), Kling & Bang (Reykjavík), L'appartement 22 (Rabat), Latitudes (Barcelona), Le commissariat (Paris), Le Dictateur (Milan), Light Industry (New York), Lucie Fontaine (Milan), lugar a dudas (Cali), Mousse (Milan), Next Visit (Berlin), New Jerseyy (Basel), Not An Alternative (New York), no.w.here (London), Or Gallery (Vancouver), Oregon Painting Society (Portland), Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Peep-Hole (Milan), PiST/// (Istanbul), Post-Museum (Singapore), PSL [Project Space Leeds] (Leeds), Rhizome (New York), Sala-Manca & Mamuta (Jerusalem), Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Scrawl Collective (London), studio1.1 (London), Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art (New York), The Mountain School of Arts (Los Angeles), The Museum of Everything (London), The Royal Standard (Liverpool), The Suburban (Chicago), The Western Front Society (Vancouver), Thisisnotashop (Dublin), Torpedo - supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Tranzit.cz (Prague), Viafarini DOCVA (Milan), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Western Bridge (Seattle), White Columns (New York) and Y3K (Melbourne)

MOVE ON ASIA 2010

organized by: AAF
hosted by: Gallery Loop (http://www.galleryloop.com/)
title: Three Minutes of Sealed Time
period: April 8 - May 10, 2010
venue: Gallery Loop

Participating planners: Philippines: PatricK D. Flores, Singapore: Eugene Tan, Japan: Sumitomo Fumihiko, Hara Hisako, Iida Shihoko, Iemura Kayoko, Amenomori Nov, China: Leng Lin, Huang Du Hong Kong: Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, Australia: Stephanie Han, Jen Mizuik
Indonesia: Ade Darmawan, India: Johan Pijnappel, Sri Lanka: Jagath Weerasinghe
Vietnam: Do Thi Tuyet Mai, Turkey; Pelin Uran, Thailand: Gridthiya Gaweewong, Korea: Suh Jinsuk, Kim sungyeon

The nineteenth-century author Charles Lamb wrote, "Nothing puzzles me more than time and space. And yet, nothing troubles me less than time and space, because I never think of them."What is time? Is time an ever flowing stream filled with waters of dreams as described by an old hymn?
The advent of new technologies and media in the 20th century catalyzed the rise of new genres in contemporary art such as video art, digital art and interactive art. Art has progressed to embrace not only lines, planes and space, but also time. Time takes shape when intertwined with space. By the theory of relativity, every observer uses a different yardstick, against which time is measured. There exists no absolute, objective length of time that can create an identical sensation in people. From a psychological point of view, the duration of emotional experience varies for each individual to a greater extent. Time is much more than what is measured in the units of minutes, hours and days. It is a concept transcending experience, both first-hand and indirect, amid an interaction between an artwork and a spectator.
Video art is similar to movies and TV programs in that each piece has a running time demarcated by the front and back ends and that it is interpreted through the flow of time. However, it involves an intrinsically more complicated concept of time that clearly stands apart from conventional genres of art. Time in video art is characterized by simultaneity and promptness often experienced through TV, unlike the traditional narrative within the boundaries of linear time and illusion of time found in movies. Furthermore, it demonstrates the fragmented, uncertain, indeterminate and discontinuous nature unseen in TV. Since 1980s, video technologies have made great strides, which enabled video artists to control, cause a crack in, split and put a stop to time in their works as well as freely manipulating linear time. This time-related input plays an active role in providing unique experience to observers rather than simply delivering the context of a piece. Another words, time manipulated and warped by a video artist is recognized by a spectator as more than physical time and absorbed into each individual's inner concept of time. These two concepts cannot but clash, and the spectator ultimately ends up following the flow of his/her own emotions rather than the flow of time demonstrated by the art piece. It is more dramatically apparent in the genre of interactive art. The horizontal co-existence of internal linear time created by sequencing codes that put an artwork into operation and create images and external linear time resulted from the involvement of a spectator provides an undisturbed realm of time to help the artwork achieve its original purpose.
The film director Andrei Tarkovsky said in his book that video images are fragments of sealed time.
This exhibition contemplates on the significance of sealed time (or running time) in video art and delineates the wide-ranging ways of materializing time through manipulating and metamorphosing the concept to see how spectators respond to this intrinsic attribute of video art and how such experience in turn influences the relationship between art and spectators.

Written by SUH Junsuk( Director, Alternative Space Loop)

• "Ilista Mo na Lang sa Tubig"
• (Just Write Them on the Water)
• An essay written by Filipino Professor and Curator Patrick Duarte Flores
• for MOVE ON ASIA 2010 organized by the Loop Gallery, Seoul.

In faraway Norway, Jet Pascua’s art seems remote, his video, distant. But dwelling on the work "Just Write Them on the Water" (2006), a transliteration of the Filipino saying “Ilista Mo na Lang sa Tubig,” the gap between origin and migration, the tropical and the foreign, is crossed poignantly. And it is uncanny that the vehicle of this crossing is water and the aspiration to remember is textual. Well, almost .

We see a hand wielding a stick, going through the motions of inscribing something on the liquid surface, the marks never really being impressed on its fluid slate, seemingly just stirring and crumpling the placid reflection. What we see is this toil that is apparently not an instrument to any end, except perhaps to play as the rustle of the water permeates the scene, with varying energies and pressures, only to revert to stillness.

We learn that the hand is writing through the piece of crooked timber names of people who have died in another country, in the artist’s archipelago of so many islands. They are not ordinary folks who have passed on; they are martyrs to political causes refused by regimes paradoxically after the fall of the dictatorship in the eighties. It may appear banal and routinary, but with the title in mind, the gesture becomes a ritual of recollection, of recalling the past and committing it to memory, which is all flux, in the context of a current performance.

What inflects the melancholy is the weight of the Filipino passage. It speaks of forgetting, of not confronting issues and problems, of by extension denying justice to the grieving and the dispossessed. We therefore discern here indignation as the names are recovered and rewritten in futility, a romantic evocation of the disappeared through a deed that does not ensure appearance: a negation of a negation that is a productive failure.

Pascua’s passion seems to lie in the politics of inscription, the aesthetic of the graphic. In a previous exhibition of drawing, he spins the notion of repetition and discipline. In the said video project, he refers to the novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, to take us to Macondo where the village suffers from collective amnesia and has to nominate almost everything as if from tabula rasa. This garcimarquesian panic serves as foil to this film’ s deep disquiet, a testament of loss, absence, and dis-place. His other works betray affinity with this tedium-transcendence , such as Scratching the Surface (2008) in which he writes the word history on immaculate paper with a ballpoint pen over and over again until the tortured word recedes into a palimpsest of ink and in Vanishing Horizon (2008) in which he traces a line on a wall with a pencil and erases the trail at the same time, with delicacy and fury respectively.

For a place that forgets so easily, that is so taken by mystifications about freedom and it s heroes, this is radically sad, more acutely so if imagined from exile. There is repetition, surely, and very little change across the rivers and lakes and seas of the artist’s otherwise buoyant nation.

‘A Country Road. A Tree.’ by Jet Pascua
Opening Reception: March 17, Wednesday, 6-9pm
Show Dates: March 17- April 17, 2010
20Square at SLab | Silverlens Gallery

It’s been three years since Jet Pascua’s last solo exhibition in Manila. This March, he returns to the Philippine art scene, armed with perspectives enriched by global experiences – from his Fine Arts education and residency in Norway, to his numerous exhibitions in Oslo, Berlin, and his adopted hometown of Tromsø.

On his return, Pascua zeroes in on drawings, choosing to momentarily set aside his characteristic video and installation art. For his latest work, entitled A Country Road. A Tree, Pascua’s graphite drawings on wood (some of which with acrylic paint to ‘color’ the image), meets the classic play, Waiting for Godot.

Pascua’s drawings absorb the atmosphere of the play’s opening scene where two men wait at a country road, at a tree for someone called Godot. Unsure of everything else except the road with a tree, the two men wait mindlessly, endlessly. Like Samuel Beckett’s play, Pascua’s exhibit is about repetition and question. A Country Road. A Tree finds thematic symmetry with the two men’s decision to pass time by making nothing as something that needs to be done; thus finding themselves in a world that repeats itself. 

Pascua explains drawing as a kind of performance, “repeating a certain movement, a stroke, hundreds or thousands of times until a desired outcome is achieved”. Turning nothing (strokes) into something (image), however controlled, is also filled with questions of whether the cycle has an end. Does it end because the act has been achieved and the point made, or does it end because “ I am too tired to continue”, Pascua wonders.

Pascua’s life too mirrors this repetitive theme. Despite having lived in Norway for six years now, Pascua feels he is still on a journey, caught in a “virtual space of being neither here nor there”, still waiting to arrive at a supposed destination. And as if waiting for Godot himself, he wonders if he is “waiting for something that may not even come”. So while he waits, Pascua comes back to Manila, where his journey began, armed with his art- his country road, his tree – hoping that these are markers of his way forward.

Words by: Bea Davila