Painting the Disappeared
I'm posting a short write-up I did for Yasmin Sison's show The Punky Brewster Session held at mag:net gallery Katipunan from May 24 to June 11 this year (hope the artist and mag:net both don't mind) .
In the course of freelance writing for galleries, I guess there are times when some art works are personally striking (and exciting) in a significant way: not only in terms of exquisite visuals but also in their contextual significance to myself as a viewer. The works may or may not be overtly "political" in their imagery and themes, but nonetheless make good sense when understood in the context of these disturbing times. At their best, these are works that have the power to make us think of--or rethink--relations between prevailing realities. I think that was the case when I saw Sison's paintings for this show.
The effect of the works may have been unintentional. Perhaps it has to do with personally having friends who were victims of human rights violations, but the first thing that I thought of when I opened the file images of her works were all the photographs of people who were abducted under the Arroyo administration, images of people who have been literally cut off from being seen and held by their families, friends, and colleagues, cut out from the rest of society by unknown abductors.
I remember the photographs of the desaparecidos: some are from IDs but others are snapshots of the victims during happier days. Sans the texts and slogans, Karen Empeno looks like just another young girl, no different from you and me, grinning in what looks like a cropped shot of a crowded rally or a field trip on a sunny day.
Now, whenever I look at Sison's works, where images of people are cut out from their immediate surroundings, a chill runs through my spine. I think of what Karen and Sherlyn's abductors have done, and are trying to do with many others--eliminate the person from existing so that nothing, not even the memory of them, remains. And this is why abductions are said to be the most cruel forms of human rights violations that can ever be committed against a person: without the certainty of closure, in whatever form it may take, their abductors and the masterminds behind it shall forever leave a gaping hole in the lives of the people their victims leave behind, like a jigsaw puzzle with the last piece missing.
Their abductors from the military may think that this is all a whimsical game, a project that needs to be implemented in the course of "knowing the enemy". But for those whose lives have included and intersected with that of the victims, the loss painfully alters and shatters repeatedly, in the absence of knowing.
I think the most of the works in the show have the power to quietly articulate that sense and process of displacement. I wanted to do a longer and separate article on this but ran out of time before the show ended: May and June being such crazy, busy months with the national elections and mining campaigns and other equally important mid-year deadlines. Oh well. Anyway, here's the partial text of the write-up:
Memory, presence and the various excisions of these are explored in The Punky Brewster Session, Yasmin Sison's latest one-woman exhibition at mag:net. Sison exhibits paintings in oil on canvas, ranging in size from 6 x 4 ft. and 3 x 4 ft., which the artist considers as a "continuation of previous works that deal with memory, collective memory and the mutability of memories and thus its inherent possibilities".
In her previous show entitled Unmade (this time at mag:net Paseo), Sison "covers up supposed personages" whose photographs fill the pages of found fashion magazines, rendering them anonymous, cut out and erased from the pretty picture plane. Barely a year later, her follow-up exhibition ventures beyond the confines of pictorial shoots and comfortable interiors. It features works that focus on the people either engaged in acts or located at the peripheries of sites which can be initially associated with amusement and fun: the carnival grounds, an unmade bed ready for a sleep-over session, a classroom in a state of disarray.
But more than to merely effect a change of scenery, the works dare disturb. Though the artist professes that the series is perhaps "more about…images that have a [sense of] play"—her take on the formal aspects of the work emphasizes the process of creating negative images from cut outs "that tend to look like a grade school project"—one can not help
but sense the incidental social irony denoted by the show. For Sison's paintings—which deal with excisions of bodies and presences—are being exhibited at a political and social period rife with intermittent reports of human rights violations: mutilations, erasures of words and lives, literal disappearances and rub-outs. At a time when the body count of desaparecidos (a Spanish term referring to South American victims of state terrorism and later assimilated into the Philippines during Martial Law) has reached over 200 since Arroyo took over the Palace seat back in 2001, the paintings indirectly recall the memory—no matter how suppressed—of how people are being mutilated, made to disappear, and similarly excised inside classrooms, homes and malls.
Whether Sison intentionally alludes to this or not, the 1980s American sitcom Punky Brewster (from which the exhibition derives its title) ironically revolves around the life of a little girl whose parents have disappeared and abandoned her while still an infant. Sison may have initially chosen the title based on the effects of colors and textures utilized in her works (defining these as more of a "pop song more than an opera" if made into a song), but this whimsical and innocent juxtaposition of the works in the context of the ongoing human rights crisis make the irony of all this seem grimmer. What is being exhibited, thus, is not only a conceptual representation of a grade school project, but documentary evidences of Mutilation: a defacement of form, recollection, and presence. More than being formal exercises in visual perception, the works are indirect reminders that life outside the gallery, unlike in TV sitcoms, does not always end up with happy, picture-perfect endings.
----
From a recent press conference:
--- Dr. Edita T. Burgos,
mother of abducted agriculturist and activist Jonas Burgos
In the course of freelance writing for galleries, I guess there are times when some art works are personally striking (and exciting) in a significant way: not only in terms of exquisite visuals but also in their contextual significance to myself as a viewer. The works may or may not be overtly "political" in their imagery and themes, but nonetheless make good sense when understood in the context of these disturbing times. At their best, these are works that have the power to make us think of--or rethink--relations between prevailing realities. I think that was the case when I saw Sison's paintings for this show.
The effect of the works may have been unintentional. Perhaps it has to do with personally having friends who were victims of human rights violations, but the first thing that I thought of when I opened the file images of her works were all the photographs of people who were abducted under the Arroyo administration, images of people who have been literally cut off from being seen and held by their families, friends, and colleagues, cut out from the rest of society by unknown abductors.I remember the photographs of the desaparecidos: some are from IDs but others are snapshots of the victims during happier days. Sans the texts and slogans, Karen Empeno looks like just another young girl, no different from you and me, grinning in what looks like a cropped shot of a crowded rally or a field trip on a sunny day.
Now, whenever I look at Sison's works, where images of people are cut out from their immediate surroundings, a chill runs through my spine. I think of what Karen and Sherlyn's abductors have done, and are trying to do with many others--eliminate the person from existing so that nothing, not even the memory of them, remains. And this is why abductions are said to be the most cruel forms of human rights violations that can ever be committed against a person: without the certainty of closure, in whatever form it may take, their abductors and the masterminds behind it shall forever leave a gaping hole in the lives of the people their victims leave behind, like a jigsaw puzzle with the last piece missing.
Their abductors from the military may think that this is all a whimsical game, a project that needs to be implemented in the course of "knowing the enemy". But for those whose lives have included and intersected with that of the victims, the loss painfully alters and shatters repeatedly, in the absence of knowing.
I think the most of the works in the show have the power to quietly articulate that sense and process of displacement. I wanted to do a longer and separate article on this but ran out of time before the show ended: May and June being such crazy, busy months with the national elections and mining campaigns and other equally important mid-year deadlines. Oh well. Anyway, here's the partial text of the write-up:
Memory, presence and the various excisions of these are explored in The Punky Brewster Session, Yasmin Sison's latest one-woman exhibition at mag:net. Sison exhibits paintings in oil on canvas, ranging in size from 6 x 4 ft. and 3 x 4 ft., which the artist considers as a "continuation of previous works that deal with memory, collective memory and the mutability of memories and thus its inherent possibilities".
In her previous show entitled Unmade (this time at mag:net Paseo), Sison "covers up supposed personages" whose photographs fill the pages of found fashion magazines, rendering them anonymous, cut out and erased from the pretty picture plane. Barely a year later, her follow-up exhibition ventures beyond the confines of pictorial shoots and comfortable interiors. It features works that focus on the people either engaged in acts or located at the peripheries of sites which can be initially associated with amusement and fun: the carnival grounds, an unmade bed ready for a sleep-over session, a classroom in a state of disarray.
But more than to merely effect a change of scenery, the works dare disturb. Though the artist professes that the series is perhaps "more about…images that have a [sense of] play"—her take on the formal aspects of the work emphasizes the process of creating negative images from cut outs "that tend to look like a grade school project"—one can not help
but sense the incidental social irony denoted by the show. For Sison's paintings—which deal with excisions of bodies and presences—are being exhibited at a political and social period rife with intermittent reports of human rights violations: mutilations, erasures of words and lives, literal disappearances and rub-outs. At a time when the body count of desaparecidos (a Spanish term referring to South American victims of state terrorism and later assimilated into the Philippines during Martial Law) has reached over 200 since Arroyo took over the Palace seat back in 2001, the paintings indirectly recall the memory—no matter how suppressed—of how people are being mutilated, made to disappear, and similarly excised inside classrooms, homes and malls. Whether Sison intentionally alludes to this or not, the 1980s American sitcom Punky Brewster (from which the exhibition derives its title) ironically revolves around the life of a little girl whose parents have disappeared and abandoned her while still an infant. Sison may have initially chosen the title based on the effects of colors and textures utilized in her works (defining these as more of a "pop song more than an opera" if made into a song), but this whimsical and innocent juxtaposition of the works in the context of the ongoing human rights crisis make the irony of all this seem grimmer. What is being exhibited, thus, is not only a conceptual representation of a grade school project, but documentary evidences of Mutilation: a defacement of form, recollection, and presence. More than being formal exercises in visual perception, the works are indirect reminders that life outside the gallery, unlike in TV sitcoms, does not always end up with happy, picture-perfect endings.
----
From a recent press conference:
I repeat, I accuse the Army
of the crime of kidnapping my son Jonas
on April 28, 2007
at the Ever Gotesco Mall in Quezon City.
I strongly suspect that either or both
of the former commanding officers of the 56th IB,
Lt. Col. Clement and Lt. Col. Feliciano
are participants in that crime.
And the Chief of Staff
of the Armed Forces of the Philippines,
Gen. Hermogenes Esperon,
is covering up the crime
committed against Jonas.
of the crime of kidnapping my son Jonas
on April 28, 2007
at the Ever Gotesco Mall in Quezon City.
I strongly suspect that either or both
of the former commanding officers of the 56th IB,
Lt. Col. Clement and Lt. Col. Feliciano
are participants in that crime.
And the Chief of Staff
of the Armed Forces of the Philippines,
Gen. Hermogenes Esperon,
is covering up the crime
committed against Jonas.
--- Dr. Edita T. Burgos,
mother of abducted agriculturist and activist Jonas Burgos
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