Diving and Thinking
What is Current in Raqs Media Collective, Today

Raqs Media Collective, artists and curators based in Delhi, slated to be the Artistic Directors of the forthcoming Yokohama Triennial, are in the Philippines on a short trip to research new materials for their work, as well as to meet with the artistic community. In ‘Diving and Thinking’ a presentation of the current stage of their practice, they will  presents the eddies and currents in their thinking - the things that occupy their triangulated minds - these range from a concern with the futures and histories of materials and energies, as well as forays into shipwrecks, mines and spaces of open and hidden power.

This artist talk is open and free to the public. 

As part of Ergun’s ESKWELA seminar, this artist talk will navigate through Ergun's filmmaking practice, unearthing representations of communities that are not known to a greater public and the importance of ritual in such groups. Specifically, the talk will be centered around his work with OFW communities in different parts of the world including his 10-year research in the making of Bibinining Promised Land (2010), which is currently on view at BAP Outpost. Ergun will share never before seen footage of works in collaboration with the OFW in Israel and in Turkey, including pageant events in which he participated as host or judge, as well as other research-based, non-film projects with various communities. 

Ergun’s preoccupations are based on forms of contemporary rituals and celebrations, religious or secular, through events such as national holidays, beauty contests, world fairs, and the Olympics. Under the topic of Context-Responsive Art Practice, Ergun's seminar is addressed to artists and filmmakers inclined toward the importance and role of archives, engagement in artistic research, and collaboration with ethnographers, historians, and sociologists to constitute the current political situations. This seminar is schedule the following day, on Saturday, May 25 from 2pm to 5pm. 

This artist talk is open and free to the public. To sign up for the second day session, please email info@eskwelabap.com. Limited slots available. 

Köken Ergun ​(born 1976, Istanbul) is a Turkish artist working in film and installation. Having studied acting at the İstanbul University, Ergun completed his postgraduate diploma degree in Ancient Greek Literature at King's College London, followed by an MA degree on Art History at the Bilgi University. After working with American theatre director Robert Wilson, Ergun became involved with video and film. His multi-channel video installations have been exhibited internationally at institutions including Garage Moscow, Documenta 14, Paris Triennale, SALT, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Protocinema, KIASMA, Digital ArtLab Tel Aviv, Casino Luxembourg, Para-Site and Kunsthalle Winterthur. His films received several awards at film festivals including the “Tiger Award for Short Film” at the 2007 Rotterdam Film Festival and the “Special Mention Prize” at the 2013 Berlinale. Ergun’s works are included in public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, EMST, Stadtmuseum Berlin and Kadist Foundation. 

Running time: 80 mins.

A hybrid work set in the uniquely rough world of the Bolivian mines, Dark Skull is a character drama and an idiosyncratic portrait of workers’ daily lives. The narrative unfolds around the troubled and troublesome Elder, sent to live with his grandmother in Huanuni, a small country town in Bolivia. Once there, Elder proves a constant embarrassment to his godfather, Francisco, frequently skipping work to get drunk or high. But his off-the-clock activities eventually lead him to a dark secret about Francisco’s involvement in his father’s death. Shot largely inside the mines, and made in collaboration with the miners’ union, Kiro Russo’s elegant and formally daring film employs an ambitious structure and gorgeous cinematography to express the nuances and codes of the workers.

About the Director:
Director, producer and screenwriter Kiro Russo was born in La Paz, Bolivia in 1984. He studied Film Directing in Buenos Aires. He filmed the shorts ENTERPRISSE (2010), JUKU (2012, Short Film Grand Prize at IndieLisboa), and NEW LIFE (2015), awarded at Locarno and Ficunam. DARK SKULL (2016) is his first feature film, set to premiere at the FF Locarno.

Zoetrope with Ally Javellana is a children's workshop based on our current exhibition, Lucy Raven: Internal Properties of the Earth.

Inspired by Lucy Raven's photographic animations, China Town (2009) and The Deccan Trap (2015), this workshop will introduce children to creating their own zoetrope, which is a pre-film animation device that produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion. 

This workshop is free and open to children ages 7-12.

RSVP: vargasmuseum@gmail.com | 928-1927

Kathmandu-based Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari are members of ArTree Nepal, an artist collective whose varied interdisciplinary practices are grounded in social practice, particularly responding to some of the most pressing social-political issues in Nepal including mass migration and women’s rights, among others. The artists will speak about their individual practice as well as how their collaborative work through ArTree Nepal with different individuals, including artisans, engineers, and writers initiates strategic grassroots interventions with the goal of fostering and empowering marginalized communities. 

This talk is organized by Bellas Artes Projects in partnership with Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center.

Running time: 25:46 minutes
There will be Q+A with Stephanie Comilang after the screening.

Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise) is a science fiction documentary set in Hong Kong at Central, the business district and pivotal place where the Filipino migrant worker occupies on Sundays. The film is narrated from the perspective of Paraiso, a ghost played by a drone who speaks of the isolation from being uprooted and thrown into a newplace. Paraiso’s reprieve comes when she is finally able to interact with the women during their ritual gatherings at Central and accomplish her purpose, which is to transmit their vlogs, photos, and messages back home. The next day, she is forced back into her weekly isolation and is left in an existential rut.

Stephanie Comilang is a Filipino-Canadian artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design. A talk by the artist will immediately follow wherein she will discuss her filmmaking practice and the overarching themes in the film including the use of technology fas a coping tool, modern isolation, economic migration and the role of public space in both urban and digital forms.

Bellas Artes Projects and the CCP proudly present Your Special Island, a lecture-performance by the Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong, unpacking the inherent racism and building of empire found in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 Broadway musical and 1958 Hollywood film South Pacific. Taking place in the backdrop of the Pacific campaign during World War II, the plot, lyrics and staged scenery of South Pacific largely influenced the West’s mediatized exotic projection on the Pacific region, its inhabitants, and America’s Post-war control upon it. Wong’s presentation centers around the musical’s song “Bali Ha’I,” a hypnotic siren soundtrack about an unknown, exotic and unimaginable “special island.” The song is interpreted by Bloody Mary, a Tonkinese female character played by the African-American actor Juanita Hall (in the Hollywood version). With a fake, broken English, Bloody Mary is portrayed as the “native-expert” who panders her own daughter towards marrying a white American lieutenant, who in turn is struggling with his own angst for desiring a non-white woman. Premiering at the CCP as a lecture-performance, Your Special Island is presented at a timely decolonized perspective around race and identity, as well as in an era of new order in the militarization of the seas off the shores of the Asia-Pacific region.
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About the Artist
Ming Wong builds layers of cinematic language, social structure, identity and introspection through his re-telling of world cinema and popular culture in his videos, installations and performances. With imperfect translations and reenactments, he casts an actor (often himself) as every character in a story. Wong attempts to unravel ideas of “authenticity,” “originality” and “the Other,” with reference to the act of human performativity. He looks into how culture, gender and identity are constructed, reproduced and circulated, as well as how it all feeds into the politics of representation. Though untrained as an actor, he has embarked on an artistic practice that is at once highly influenced by cinema and is in constant dialogue with measures of performativity, gender, and difference. Recent projects have become more interdisciplinary, incorporating performance and installation to flesh out his exploration of cultural artifacts from around the world.

Wong represented Singapore at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 with the solo presentation Life of Imitation, which was awarded a special mention. His work has been shown recently at Busan Biennale, South Korea; Dakar Biennale, Senegal; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Para Site, Hong Kong; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; and Centre National de la Danse, Paris (all 2018). He has had solo exhibitions at leading institutions worldwide including UCCA, Beijing; Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo; REDCAT, Los Angeles. He additionally has participated in Sydney Biennale (2016 & 2010); Asia Pacific Triennial (2015); Shanghai Biennale (2014); Lyon Biennale (2013); Liverpool Biennial (2012); Gwangju Biennale (2010); Performa 11, New York (2010).

This event is free and open to the public.

This mentorship session with curator Agustin Pérez Rubio, co-curator of 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), welcomes curators, writers, artists, and historians. The session will be held on Friday, February 15 at 1PM. Each participant will be given a short, dedicated time slot to present an exhibition critique, a curatorial project or writing sample to the group followed by a critical engagement and exchange led by Pérez Rubio. As such, those with interest in art criticism and curatorial practice are strongly encouraged to apply. This program is free and all participants from all levels in their practice are welcome to apply.

The Forgotten Space of Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's essay film is the sea, the oceans through which 90% of the world's cargo now passes. At the heart of this space is the container box, which, since its invention in the 1950s, has become one of the most important mechanisms for the global spread of capitalism.

The film details the catastrophic effects globalization has wrought on the ship, truck and train industries. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. At a moment when collective bargaining rights are under attack in the United States, and China continues to bow to foreign pressures to prevent such rights from being granted at all, this film asks: Is capitalism the Trojan horse that turns on its inventors?

This event is free and open to the public.

Bellas Artes Outpost
2/F The Alley at Karrivin
2316 Chino Roces Ave, Makati

This event is open and free to the public.

"Internal Properties of the Earth" is American artist Lucy Raven’s first solo exhibition in Asia curated by former BAP Artistic Director Diana Campbell Betancourt. The exhibition presents ten years of work that stem from Raven’s longstanding exploration of the American landscape through its analog and wireless connections to global networks of labor and material extraction and exchange across China, India, the Philippines, and the United States.

The exhibition debuts a new photographic series Fire and Mud (2018-2019), drawing inspiration from the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo and the subsequent evacuation of the nearby Clark Air Force Base, to examine the ongoing effects of American colonialism in the country. Raven’s photographs, produced as part of an ongoing film project developed over the last two years as part of her residency in Bataan, is a study into material phase changes from liquid to solid and back again, as a means to explore the larger implications and effects of state change.

About the Artist
Born in Tucson, Arizona (USA) in 1977, Lucy Raven received a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history from the University of Arizona, Tucson (2000), and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2008). Primarily grounded in animation and the moving image, Raven’s multidisciplinary practice also incorporates still photography, installation, sound, and performative lecture. Her work deploys image-making processes used in twenty-first-century filmmaking, which often hide the underlying labor in order to investigate the impact of industrial systems and technology within a global infrastructure. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim.

6/F SDA Black Box
De La Salle College of Saint Benilde (DLS-CSB)
950 P. Ocampo St., Malate

RSVP: benildeartsandculturecluster@benilde.edu.ph
This event is open and FREE to the public.

London-based Eddie Peake’s art includes performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture, sound and installation. It has tended to take the form of non-linear, immersive exhibitions, usually presented as a web of incongruously and yet inextricably connected discrete objects. One of its foci is the implicit drama within relationships between people, whether they are familial, professional, romantic, sexual or social, and how desire, sexuality, socio-political and cultural constructs, as well as psychological states such as depression impact on them. Peake also DJs under a pseudonym and runs a record label imprint called Hymn.
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Eddie Peake, born in London in 1981, graduated from the Slade School of Fine Arts in 2006, was a 2008-09 scholar at the British School at Rome, and graduated from the Royal Academy, London in 2013. His varied artistic vocabulary encompasses performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture and installation.

Peake’s main focus lies in the lapses and voids inherent in the process of translating between verbal language and nonverbal modes of communication. It is in the discrepancy between words and any other language tools, such as images, emotions, bodily movements or sounds, that his art is located. Peake’s work is an often-energetic spectacle in which the absurd and the erotic each find a place, and in which the artist plays a central role.

This event is organized by Bellas Artes Projects in partnership with Benilde Arts and Culture Cluster.

Gabriel (1976) is the only film directed by the Canadian-American painter Agnes Martin. It features a little boy going for a walk in a natural landscape. All shots are handheld and the film is silent, with a few moments with excerpts of musical scores by Bach. Gabriel is a contemplative and fragmentary study of landscape, vision and perceptions of nature. (Running time: 78 minutes).

Special thank you to Pace Gallery, New York. 

Agnes Martin (b. 1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada; d. 2004, Taos, New Mexico) imparted a legacy of abstraction that has inspired generations of artists. Using a limited palette and a geometric vocabulary, her works are inscribed with lines or grids that hover over subtle grounds of color. Martin’s work is recognized as pure abstraction, in which space, metaphysics and internal emotional states are explored through painting, drawing and printmaking.

Martin is the recipient of numerous awards including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the National Medal of Arts in 1998. She has been the subject of one-artist exhibitions worldwide, including a five-part retrospective at Dia: Beacon, New York, in 2007, and, most recently, a 2015 retrospective at Tate Modern, London, which will travel to Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

We’ll be serving popcorn and drinks too!

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This event is open and FREE to the public.

Since the dramatic fall of apartheid in 1994, Johannesburg has emerged as the artistic capital of sub-Saharan Africa. This episode tells the story of four artists from a diversity of South African ethnic backgrounds, identities and generations working across photography, painting, sculpture, and performance. Collectively, the artists in this hour use their work to empower marginalized communities, reexamine history, and pursue their visions for South Africa’s future.

The event was produced in collaboration with Art21, a nonprofit global in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated contact about contemporary art. Art21 also produces free education resources, aimed at changing the paradigm for teaching and learning about the creative process. The “Johannesburg” episode—as well as Art21’s library of 60+ hours of video content on contemporary art and artists—is available to stream at Art21.org.

This mentorship session with visual artist Christodoulos Panayiotou welcomes artists, creators, and performers with a conceptual-driven practice. The session will be held in one day, on Monday, November 19 from 11AM to 4PM, with breaks in between. Each participants will be given a short, dedicated time slot to present one work or a summary of their body of work to the group followed by a critical engagement and exchange led by Panayiotou. As such, those with interest in traditions of theatre and dance and/or have performing arts background are strongly encouraged to apply. This program is free and all participants from all levels in their practice are welcome to apply. 
Limited slots only.

This program is free and open to the public. To register, please fill out the form.

About Dying on Stage:
Taking as starting point Rudolf Nureyev’s 1991 staging of the classical ballet La Bayadère, choreographed while his health was critically deteriorating, Panayiotou’s lecture-performance Dying on Stage is a meditation on the impossible theatrical representation of death. Exploring various literal, metaphorical, and symbolic deaths, the artist is examining the vicious relationship between the spectator, the actor and the characters trapped in the action. Dying on Stage has been performed (amongst others) at the Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli; Serpentine Galleries, London; PERFORMA 15, New York; Centre National de la Dance, Paris; Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; Alt Bomonti, Istanbul; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Phenomenon, Anafi; the Naughton Gallery, Belfast; the Sharjah Biennial Act II, Beirut and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich.
Duration is approximately 2h15m

About the artist:
Christodoulos Panayiotou's (b. 1978, Limassol, Cyprus) wide-ranging research focuses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives in the visual records of history and time. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held (amongst others) at the 56th Venice Biennial, The Cyprus Pavilion; Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthalle Zürich; Casino Luxembourg; CCA Kitakyushu; Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brétigny; and at Point Center of Contemporary Art, Nicosia. His work was also shown in a number of group exhibitions including: the 14th Lyon Biennial; the 13th Sharjah Biennial; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; 8th Berlin Biennale; 7th Liverpool Biennial; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museion, Bolzano; Migros Museum, Zürich; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Ashkal Alwan Center for Contemporary Arts, Beirut; Artist Space, New York; MoCA Miami.

BAP’s new Artistic Director Inti Guerrero is a curator based in Hong Kong and serves as the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art for the Tate in London, and was the curator of the 38th EVA International - Ireland’s Biennial. From 2011-2014 he was the Associate Artistic Director/Curator of TEOR/ética; a non-profit art institution in Costa Rica founded in 1999. He has curated, published and lectured extensively in Asia, Europe and Latin America. His post at BAP began on July 1, 2018.

Guerrero will introduce his curatorial practice and share his vision for the future BAP. 

Working in cross disciplines, Eisa Jocson, Josh Kline and Paul Pfeiffer will discuss their use of performance, sculpture and video respectively to investigate the changing nature of human perception and behavior.
This event is free and open to public.

EISA JOCSON
Eisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines. Eisa’s works exposes body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the unique socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement out of Philippines through migrant work. In all her creations – from pole to macho dancing and hostess to Disney princess studies – capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into spatial geographies.

JOSH KLINE
Josh Kline is a curator, collaborator, and artist. Kline aligns his art with the philosophy of post-humanism. Spanning a wide variety of media with specific focus upon the technologically innovative, his art has an ergonomic sensibility. It is centred upon the ability of humanity to function efficiently within its working environment, with corporeality being marginalised in favour of digital expressions of selfhood.

PAUL PFEIFFER
Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Paul Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to examine how images shape our perception of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube, cable television, and other sources, he uses these as an occasion to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions.

Pfeiffer was a featured artist in the PBS series Art:21 – Art In The Twenty-First Century, and the recipient of a number of awards, most notably an Alpert Award for Visual Arts from CalArts in 2009, a United States Artist Fellowship in 2015, and the inaugural Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum in 2000. Pfeiffer's work has been seen in numerous national and international group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, PS1's Greater New York, the Sydney Biennial, and the 2001 Venice Biennale of Art. Pfeiffer earned a B.F.A. in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Hunter College.

Bellas Artes Projects is pleased to invite you to a children's workshop based on our current exhibition, "Paul Pfeiffer: Incarnator".

Inspired by Paul Pfeiffer’s wood works, this workshop will introduce kids to some basic techniques in casting the hands and feet using alginate and plaster. A face casting demo will also be included in this workshop.

This workshop is free and open to children aged 7-12.

Efren Madlangsakay Jr. obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines, Diliman in 2015. He was a research assistant for Cian Dayrit’s Busis Ibat Ha Kanayunan which was showed at Bellas Artes Outpost, Makati City in 2017. Efren has also showed in Tamawan Village, Baguio City; West Gallery, Quezon City; and Tin-Aw Gallery, Makati City.

Istanbul-based artist Hera Büyüktaşçıyan creates installation, sound, performance, sculpture and video. She activates three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and installation with sensorial components including performance, sound and video to breath life to the work itself. Exploring themes of displacement, identity and reconciliation, Büyüktaşçıyan creates new narratives around the notion of otherness by using metaphors such as water, a recurring symbol in her work, as the ultimate source and instrument that nurtures our memory.

This event is free and open to the public.

Paul will facilitate a two-hour seminar that will explore audio-video editing principles and techniques from a conceptual/aesthetic angle and focus on the grammar of editing and post-production as key to grasping contemporary modes of perception, experience and subjectivity. This workshop is geared towards college students with a studio art background and/or emerging artists with audio-video production studio practice. Slots are limited to 15 participants only. 

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014
103 minutes

Through Oppenheimer’s footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence. 
We encourage you to watch Oppenheimer's "Act of Killing" prior to this screening.

Free Admission. 

7:00 PM - 10:00 PM | August 18, 2018
Bellas Artes Outpost
2/F The Alley at Karrivin
2316 Chino Roces Ave, Makati
Event Registration: http://bit.ly/BAPHyperNormalisation

Includes an intermission with a hypernormalized cocktail. 

This event is open and free to the public. 
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HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. Adam Curtis tells the extraordinary story of how we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion - where those who are supposed to be in power are paralyzed - and have no idea what to do. And, where events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control - from Donald Trump to Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, and random bomb attacks. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
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Kevin Adam Curtis is a British documentary film-maker. His works explore areas of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. Curtis describes his work as journalism that happens to be expounded via the medium of film. He is most known for The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004), Pandora's Box (1992), and HyperNormalisation (2016).