A vitrine, then a window

7 single-channel HD videos
In collaboration with Dennese Victoria

2019

This suite of 7 videos were dispersed around a house-turned-gallery, each documenting a unique object related to metals, and abstracted through film and installation.

This work is interested in the translation and fidelity of objects as they pass through different people, renderings, and lenses — each made by different hands, passed on to a collaborator to be filmed, in various locations, pointing elsewhere from the exhibition’s own space and time.

The longest (A neck or a wrist) was filmed at the old Manila house in which the eventual exhibition took place. It was conceptualized alongside preparations for a concurrent exhibition for which I responded to a transnational film collaboration between Hong Kong and Manila. In “Sanda Wong” (1955), bandits covet a family’s treasures for which a snake had been hypnotized as protector. A gold necklace chain was installed in both exhibition spaces, here encircling the two-storey house in a closed loop: combining treasure, guardian, and hiding place into one entity. It is a gesture meant to bridge disparate places, or insist that they are not separate, by suspension of disbelief in magical objects. The chain was removed after filming, only the video (as part of the suite) was present at the exhibition.

More light than heat
with Lao Lianben
curated by Arianna Mercado
Calle Wright, Manila
28 Jul - 29 Nov 2019

> Exhibition publication

ArtAsiaPacific review by John Alexis Balaguer

Installation photos courtesy of Calle Wright and JL Javier