Manila Contemporary’s ‘Absence’:Performance art is alive

By TERENCE KRISHNA V. LOPEZ
Bulatlat.com

Until June 26, 2011, Manila Contemporary gallery hosts “Absence,” an exhibition of objects and installations used in the live performances it featured during the opening night last June 4.

The show exhibits new works by Indonesia-based artists Mella Jaarsma and Melati Suryodarmo and two of Manila’s most exciting visual and performance artists Bea Camacho and Racquel de Loyola. It is the culmination of the gallery’s month-long Performance Art Residency project with the said artists.

Performance art is alive

On its jam-packed opening night, the “Absence” artists made their presence felt with their new durational performances that were out of the box, heart-wrenching and extraordinary.

Controversial, engaging, hidden, powerful, dramatic, spectacular – altogether, the performance-installations were all that. And even more, depending on how one views an artwork or a performance, for that matter.

Mella Jaarsma’s “animals have no religion”(Photo by Terence Krishna Lopez / bulatlat.com)

Mella Jaarsma, known in the international art scene for her works that use materials to create meanings, collaborated with other Manila-based performance artists in her ongoing series “animals have no religion, ” in which, two of the artists portrayed/walked like animals in red garments around the space, two stood up by the wall, strapped with holster vests, tree trunk covering their upper bodies while projected on them and the spaces between and behind them were animal figures-which were being eaten by Jaarsma.

The performance gave out the impression of a theme park at a certain level, while on the other hand, being conscious about the title, animals have no religion, one naturally starts to dig deeper, look closer and understand better.

Truly, animals have no religion, means more. In fact it is part of a series in which Jaarsma explores social identities, a subject that has always been part of her works. And based on the gallery’s statement, Jaarsma here “through a complex system of objects, material and meaning she activates and questions the human need for protection in a fragile world.”

Born in the Netherlands and currently based in Yogyakarta, Jaarsma has been living in Indonesia since 1984.

While Jaarsma exhibits how “the material creates the meaning,” fellow Indonesia-based performance artist Melati Suryodarmo uses her own body in her performance-installation “conversations with black.”

As in her other works, Suryodarmo utilizes her own physical body to meld into her cultural self as she hanged herself inside a black wall with only her lower body visible to the curious audience.

Lasting a little less than two hours, Suryodarmo managed to be one with the other furniture installed- a chandelier and a carpet on the floor. In fact, Suryodarmo successfully transformed her whole self into an object itself neither by movements nor by using any spoken language but by just hanging on.

Whether it was of the artist’s intentions or not, the common question among the audience upon seeing the performance-installation conversations with black was, “is it real?”

Suryodarmo is known across Asia and Europe for her durational performances and perhaps is best described by Emanuela Nobile Mino’s words: “…very powerful images, captured and reiterated in long time performances which show the artist’s body engaged in redundant actions whose strength and solemnity look closer to epical challenges than to everyday behaviors or happenings translated and reinvented into artistic language.”

Also part of the residency project, Jaarsma and Suryodarmo facilitated a two-day performance art workshop at the gallery last May 26 and 27. In the workshop that gathered less than 20 Filipino performance artists, Jaarsma’s topic was “how the material creates the meaning” while Suryodarmo’s was “the unspoken language.”

Homes, houses in collapse

Manila artists Bea Camacho and Racquel de Loyola on the other hand, worked around the same subject of homes and/or houses but with different intentions and outcomes.

Bea Camacho’s “home” (Photo by Terence Krishna V. Lopez / bulatlat.com)

Camacho went down memory lane via “a familiar place” with a white fabric replica of her childhood home on the floor. Inside it is the artist herself, with small movements enough for the audience to know something/someone is inside the house and perhaps, for Camacho herself to feel she is part of the process in making the “home” intact or in place.

Easily, a familiar place was familiar for those who know or at least has a background of this Harvard University educated artist’s works. Using fabrics, crocheted or otherwise, disjointed furnitures or sculptures, white papers and even blank walls, she constantly tackles distance, separation, connections, disconnections or as in this latest work, the present and the past- as part of her own life’s experiences.

An Albert Alcalay and David McCord Prize awardee, Bea Camacho is currently based in Boston.

The fourth performance-installation, “mound” is rendered powerfully, with an in-your-face, no sugar-coating attitude by Manila-based performance and visual artist Racquel de Loyola in which, half of her body was buried in a mound of debris.On one of the walls of the performance-installation space, an image of high-rise buildings in the city was projected.

Racquel de Loyola’s “mound” (Photo by Terence Krishna Lopez / bulatlat.com)

Immediately, the image of demolition comes to mind, a current phenomenon experienced by the urban poor of Manila, to make way for ‘development projects’. On the other hand, the installation is lifted from de Loyola’s own personal experience.

Poetically, 2009 CCP 13 Artists awardee de Loyola successfully created the persona of an artist immersing her own physical self with the representation of the experiences of “the common people, the often forgotten section of urban Manila, the all too often demolished” in this performance-installation.

Known for her more disquiet, movements-based and elaborately costumed performances like the ‘Mebuyan project’ in which she is the goddess of nurturing, the “satisfaction” performance in which she dances on a ramp tackling consumerism and imperialism or the 2009 installation piece “blemish” that tackled the bloody issue of enforced disappearances and activist killings, de Loyola with mound puts herself at her quietest yet still with an ever so commanding presence.

The opening night of Absence was successful with the number of people who attended- a mix of artists, enthusiasts and curious individuals but it should not end there. Absence, on exhibit until the 26th of the month, must be viewed by more people, albeit without the live performances, because the experience and emotion the show elicits is unforgettable.

Manila Contemporary is at White Space, Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati City.