Philippine pavilion

The National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), together with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the Office of Senator Loren Legarda, has officially presented to the media the country‘s official participation in the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia: The Philippine Pavilion – The Spectre of Comparison.


The Spectre of Comparison was chosen among 12 curatorial proposals submitted to the Philippine Arts in Venice Biennale (PAVB) Coordinating Committee by the panel of jurors during deliberations held last August 29, 2016 at the NCCA Office in Manila. The jury was composed of Dr. Eugene Tan, Director of the National Gallery Singapore; Florentina P. Colayco, President of Metropolitan Museum of Manila; Luis “Junyee” E. Yee, Jr., a pioneer of installation art in the Philippines; then NCCA Chairperson Prof. Felipe de Leon, Jr.; and Senator Loren Legarda, principal advocate of the project.



Joselina Cruz, the curator, brings together two artists, Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo, for the 2017 Philippine Pavilion, which will be mounted in the Artiglieri of the Arsenale in Venice, Italy. The Arsenale is one of the two main exhibition spaces of the Venice Biennale.

The Philippine Pavilion will hold its vernissage on May 11, 2017. The Commissioner for the Philippine Pavilion is NCCA Chairman Virgilio Almario.

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The Pavilion: The Spectre of Comparison

Drawn from Jose Rizal‘s Noli Me Tangere is the phrase el demonio de las comparaciones (also translated to ‗the spectre of comparisons‘)—the impulse for the exhibition and the framework for the practices of Maestro and Ocampo.

“The phrase encapsulates the experience of Rizal‘s protagonist, Crisostomo Ibarra, when he gazes out at the botanical gardens of Manila and simultaneously sees the gardens of Europe. This point of realization suggests the loss of Ibarra‘s (and Rizal‘s) political innocence, this doublevision of experiencing events up close and from afar: no longer able to see the Philippines without seeing Europe nor gaze at Europe without seeing the Philippines, Cruz explained.

With this as spectral pivot, Maestro‘s and Ocampo‘s practices, aesthetically worlds apart from each other and produced through a multiplicity of contexts, are brought together in Venice.

Both artists have lived and practiced outside of the Philippines, but have maintained active engagement with the country throughout their careers. Their practice and their subject matters are deeply involved with their experiences as immigrants or citizens of a new diaspora that also reflect the complexity of a contemporary Philippine identity.

“The exhibition looks at their practices as emblematic of the experience of Rizal‘s spectre of comparisons, the juxtaposition of their works, the manifestation of political and social commentary from afar, as they saw the events of the Philippines and their adopted countries ‘through an inverted telescope’,” said Cruz.

She further explains, “Rizal‘s experience and understanding of Europe and the connections he continually made as he flipped back and forth between the contexts of home and the foreign crystallized the double-consciousness of a colonial e migre of the 19th century. The Spectre of Comparison, the exhibition, accords this global gaze to Ocampo and Maestro, not just as the simple in-between location or a knowledge of two (or several) worlds, but as a more complex imagining of the local and global as each artist re-define political resistance within their experience of shifting localities throughout their artistic careers. Woven within this twinning of practices is the space of the spectre of comparison that haunts the imagery and making of nationalisms fraught with colonial and imperialist pasts.”

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The 2017 Venice Art Biennale

The 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled Viva Arte Viva, is under the directorship of French curator Christine Macel.

Macel highlights the importance of art in society and in every person‘s life: Today, in a world full of conflicts and shocks, art bears witness to the most precious part of what makes us human. Art is the ultimate ground for reflection, individual expression, freedom, and for fundamental questions…It stands as an unequivocal alternative to individualism and indifference. It builds us up and edifies us. At a time of global disorder, art embraces life, even if doubt ensues inevitably.*

*Viva Arte Viva, Introduction by Christine Macel.

Philippine Pavilion - Tie A String Around the World

Artists: Manuel Conde, Carlos Francisco, Manny Montelibano, Jose Tence Ruiz

Curator: Patrick D. Flores

The Philippine Pavilion moves around Manuel Conde’s Genghis Khan, a seminal Philippine film made in 1950 in Manila and Angono; re-edited and annotated by the American writer-critic James Agee; and screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Film Festival in 1952. It was co-written and designed by Carlos Francisco. Conde and Francisco are National Artists of the Philippines. The theme of the Pavilion comes from the line uttered by Genghis Khan at the end of the film as he promised his lady to lay the empire he will conquer at her feet.

As the Philippine representation returns to Venice in 2015 after fifty-one years, so is the film revisited as a trajectory into the very idea of Venice as the place that first recognized the country through the moving image. This travel offers an opportunity to reflect on the condition of the world today and the potential of a Philippine Pavilion to initiate a conversation on the changing configurations of this world--on the volatile meanings of territory, country, nation, border,  patrimony, nature, freedom, limit,  and the “present passing.”

At a tangent to Genghis Khan, the work of Jose Tence Ruiz, Shoal, references the Sierra Madre. TheNew York Times describes it as the vessel of Vietnam War vintage that “the Philippine government ran aground on the reef in 1999 and has since maintained as a kind of post-apocalyptic military garrison, the small detachment of Filipino troops stationed there struggling to survive extreme mental and physical desolation.” Ruiz evokes the spectral ship as an ambivalent silhouette of a shoal through his assemblage of metal, velvet, and wood. The trace that is also a monument thus settles into and becomes a reef-outpost-detritus-ark floating on a contested vastness, at once forlorn and prevailing both as saga and shipwreck.

For his part, Manny Montelibano presents the multi-channel video piece, A Dashed State, on the West Philippine Sea, which is part of the disputed South China Sea. It dwells on the atmosphere of a lush locale, particularly the sound of epics and radio frequencies that crisscross the expanse, and the vignettes of seemingly uneventful life ways of islands. The film invites discussion on the history of world making and the history of the sea in the long duration, and in relation to the histories of empires, nation-states, and regions. From the vantage point of Palawan, threshold to Borneo and the South China Sea, Montelibano films the conditions of the impossible: what makes a common sea and where do frontier and edge, melancholy and migration lie.

Patrick Flore curatore del Padiglione delle Filippine

Il sito del Manila Times  annuncia che sarà Patrick Flores il curatore del Padiglione delle Filippine con una mostra dal titolo “Tie A String Around the World”

Press release

The National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), in partnership with the Office of Sen. Loren Legarda, announced the selection of Patrick Flores’s curatorial proposal titled “Tie A String Around the World” as the official Philippine participation at the 56th Venice Art Biennale in 2015.

The esteemed panel of jurors, noted names in the field of modern and contemporary art and culture, was composed of Mami Kataoka, chief curator, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; Paul Pfeiffer, New York-based multi-media artist; Renaud Proch, executive director, Independent Curators International; Cid Reyes, respected critic, artist and writer; Felipe de Leon Jr. NCCA chairman; and Sen. Loren Legarda, principal advocate and visionary behind the Philippine participation at the Venice Biennale.

The panel deliberated on 16 proposals for two days on September 4 and 5 at the NCCA Boardroom in Intramuros, Manila.

Flores’s curatorial concept is a poetic and political reflection on the history of world making, the links between geography and politics, and the notions of nation, territory, and archipelago. It foregrounds the extensities of the Philippines, a foil perhaps to the more aggressive instincts of expansion around us—in the past and in “present passing.”

“Tie A String Around the World” revolves around Manuel Conde’s 1950 film Genghis Khan, co-written and designed by National Artist Carlos Francisco, screened at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Venice Film Festival in 1952, where it competed with the films of Chaplin, Clement, Fellini, Bergman, and Mizoguchi.

The said film tells the story of the young Genghis Khan, his passage into the life of a warrior. It ends with the conqueror, perched on a mountain, casting his magisterial gaze over his dominion and promising his woman to “tie a string around the world” and lay it at her feet.

This is a tale of the “king of kings” and the formation of empires that have strung the islands of the world. Genghis Khan’s empire stretched from the Pacific to Europe, the largest contiguous realm ever.

The newly restored film Genghis Khan will be exhibited at the Pavilion and will be positioned in conversation with the contemporary art projects of intermedia artist Jose Tence Ruiz and filmmaker Mariano Montelibano 3rd.

The Pavilion seeks to initiate discussion on the history of the sea and its relationship with the current world, claims to patrimony, and the struggle of nation-states over vast and intensely contested nature.

It locates the Philippines in the world through its deep ties to ancient cultures, its precocious modern art, and the critical responses of contemporary art to present predicaments. Through the work of artists across generations, this history is told as a history of art and a history of the world.

The panel of jurors was impressed with the quality of most of the 16 submissions. They thought that most of the proposals were intellectually remarkable. After a two-day deliberation, the discussions came down to three strong proposals. Ultimately, the jury deemed Flores’s proposal the most fitting for the country’s return to contemporary art world’s first and oldest biennale after a 50-year hiatus.

Flores is professor at the University of the Philippines Department of Art Studies and curator of the Vargas Museum. He is adjunct curator of the National Art Gallery, Singapore; a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council; and a guest scholar of the Getty Research Institute in 2014.

The Venice Art Biennale will open on May 9 and will run until November 22, 2015.