Motions of this Kind

The exhibit incorporated a range of public programming, including a performance by artist Eisa Jocson in her first performance in the UK; a range of experimental film screenings; as well as a one-day colloquium on 12 April 2019 at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London. The exhibition ran from 12 April to 22 June 2019.

Following the successful show in London in 2019, a roundtable discussion was held on 20 February 2020 at the UP Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. The activity allowed curators and artists to share reflections and insights from their experience working together in London. In attendance were Yason Banal, Jon Cuyson, Cian Dayrit, Renan Laru-an, Kat Medina and Rafael Schacter.

We co-presented Motions of this Kind: A roundtable discussion with the Vargas Museum.

Yason Banal

Yason Banal is an artist whose work moves between and among video, photography, sculpture, performance, text and painting, taking myriad forms and critical strategies in order to research and explore associations, frictions and refractions among seemingly divergent systems.

Jon Cuyson

Jon Cuyson was born and educated in the Philippines and has been in solo and group exhibitions in Manila since 1999. He started exhibiting in Europe since 2002. His works employ different techniques and media including texts, photographs, painting, artist books, installations, video and interventions.

Cian Dayrit

Cian Dayrit is an intermedia artist working with painting, sculpture and installation. Straddling between fact and fiction, Dayrit’s works explore origins and histories, and their representations, in visual apparatus, from the map, curiosity cabinet and on to the museum. With an interdisciplinary practice rooted in the exploration of colonialism, ethnography, archaeology, history and mythology, Dayrit seeks to interrogate notions of power and memory, as framed by institutions, in particular museums, mass media and the state.

Lizza May David / Gabriel Rossell Santillan

With individual practices often mirroring each other around common themes – identity, knowledge, personal and subaltern narratives, amongst others – Lizza May David and Gabriel Rossell Santillán demonstrate the reciprocal influence acquired by studying together at the University of Arts Berlin, Germany. Together, the duo use their respective artistic and cultural backgrounds – Mexico and the Philippines and meeting in Germany – to assemble alternative knowledge forms based on visual appearances, indigenous chants and daily news. 

Michelle Dizon

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. The violence of imperialism and the intimate spaces of resistance within globalization form central pivots in her work which take the form of multi-channel video installations, multi-image slide projection, expanded cinema performances, essay films, photographs, discursive events, pedagogical platforms and writing.

Eisa Jocson

Eisa Jocson is a choreographer, visual artist and dancer. She exposes body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the unique socio-economic 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.

Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho

Amy Lien (b. USA) and Enzo Camacho (b. Philippines) have been collaborating since 2009. Their practice has existed through a series of geographic displacements: between their respective home cities of New York and Manila and recent periods living and working in Berlin, Milan and Singapore. Accordingly, their work reflects different models of organizing around art – particularly ‘contemporary art’ – within and outside its supposed centres.

Kat Medina

Kat Medina is a painter who utilised elements of craft-making in her works. She explores making places through architectonic nuances, extending her research to the possible lives of objects immediate to her surroundings and images through interaction, development and understanding its place within contemporary society. Medina is interested in the way that a painting can be utilized as a starting point to describe our current way of viewing within its own limitations, demands and meaning.

Mark Salvatus

Working across various disciplines and media, Mark Salvatus tries to build direct and indirect engagement using objects, photography, videos, installations and participatory projects that present different outcomes of energies, meanings and experiences. Calling his overall artistic practice ‘Salvage Projects’, a name that corresponds to the meaning of his surname, he deals with the debris of everyday politics in the city, remnants of the blurred history of the nation and its complicated narratives, and the fragments of the constant movements that he is confronting and experiencing.

Motions of this Kind  has been initiated and generously sponsored by Mercedes Zobel, partner of Outset Contemporary Art Fund, with support from Philippine Studies, SOAS, and The Office of Senator Loren Legarda .

The initiative has been made possible by the kind assistance of Approved by Pablo, British Academy, British Council, Delfina Foundation, The Department of Anthropology at University College London, Gasworks, Philippine Airlines and Vargas Museum.