MINDANAO VISUAL ARTS CARAVAN 2007-SUNGDU-AN 4 NCCA

The Socsargen leg of the Mindanao Visual Arts Caravan for the Sungdu-an 4 Flagship Project of the NCCA Committee on Visual Arts coordinated by Al-Nezzar Ali, Head CVA Socsargen Area and held at HTC Rooftop co sponsored by the Kalimudan Culture and Arts Centre and Holy Trinity College of General Santos City

With the "Sambolayang Art works on the foreground, students from HTC, RMMC, MSU and NDDU looked on intently to the lecture about arts. The programme was co-sponsored by the College of Humanities and Sciences with Dean Priscilla Marayag giving the opening message.

HTC visual artists
HTC and NDDU student artists with the local visual artists of Gensan. This programme gathered the visual artists from Sarangani, Gensan, and South Cotabato except Koronadal. If I was not mistaken, this was the first time the local visual artists of the area was gathered in full force.

‘Sungdu-an 4,’ national art exhibit, opens in Mindanao
By Mozart Pastrano
Inquirer
First Posted 02:48:00 08/13/2007

Filed Under: Culture (general), Arts (general), Lifestyle & Leisure

MANILA, Philippines -- “Sungdu-an 4: Extensions,” the national visual arts exhibit, will open at the Museum of Three Cultures at Capitol University in Cagayan de Oro City on Aug. 17.

A flagship project of the National Committee on Visual Arts (NCVA) of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the exhibit showcases 12 individual and collective works, three each from Mindanao, Visayas, Luzon, and the National Capital Region (NCR).

“Derived from the Waray word for convergence, the Sungdu-an scheme strives to track the emergent tendencies in Philippine art, regardless how fragmentary and discrepant these may be,” said project director Patrick D. Flores, art curator of the National Museum.

The operative term for this year’s Sungdu-an—“ExTensions”—signifies a movement beyond the local but at the same time remains sensitive to the conflicts and contradictions (the productive unease) in this engagement, in the process of extending or being extensive or seeking extensions.

The exhibit curators—Kelly Ramos-Palaganas (for Mindanao), Radel Paredes (the Visayas), Wire Rommel Tuazon (Luzon), and Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez (NCR), in tandem with NCVA chair Christopher Rollo—chose three kinds of work for each of their regions: existing works, new work, and site-specific projects.

The intuition of maternality in Pamela Yan’s work is ingrained in the entire structure—the furniture—of the household. Rene de Guzman’s procession of migrants haunts us as it transfigures into an army of toiling terracotta warriors.

The church is subjected to a consuming re-reading in the bleeding hands of Nomar Miano, who lays bare the mythology of catechetical truth. And, as if to confound expectations, Edwin Jumalon’s whimsy of color and stroke converses with his son Winner’s intense violation of the canvas with a different energy and spectrum.

Bembol dela Cruz measures the rationality of progress and drafts the cartography of catastrophe, reminding us of Immanuel Kant who has said: “From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Rowena Seloterio’s obsession with the vista of her mind reveals an idiosyncratic subjectivity that is exacting.

For his part, Paulo Martinez captures sound as the index of a whirling urban universe. And in an art historical redemptive program, women artists in Mindanao put up a wall of their present legacy, eclipsed through the seasons by the prejudice of gender.

For site-specific works, art that is created at the site of the exhibition, artists dwell on locus. In Marina Cruz’s experience, the self is composed of body parts that may fall out of joint and cohere again in a state of play, constantly reconstructed by social performances. Pilipinas Street Plan and Wesley Rasines present at once a glimpse and a panorama of how the technologies of painting and video, the media of graffiti painting and tattoo merge. And, conjuring an image of an odyssey, the Mindanao Art Caravan, steered by a multitude of artists from the region, harvests the “culture” of a locale in the very possibility of travel, a peregrinate instinct that finally arrives.

The exhibit opens with a cocktails reception at 5 p.m. on Aug. 17 at Capitol University’s Museum of Three Cultures in Cagayan de Oro City, where it will be on view until Sept. 18.

A Curators’ Forum unfolds at 2 p.m. on Aug. 17 at the AVR 2, 2/F University Library Building of Capitol University.