November offers a wide range of art exhibitions across different galleries in the metro.
Desire, anxiety, anonymized portraits, intercultural videos. November is an exciting month for art lovers in Metro Manila. Here’s a list of exhibits to explore.
Parallel Histories: Moving Images from the Philippines and United Kingdom
Curated by award-winning writer Erwin Romulo, and presented in partnership with the British Council in the Philippines, Parallel Histories is a showcase of moving images from five artists each from the Philippines and the United Kingdom. The collection of works in the show highlights experiences and artistic visions influenced by cultural, social, and political conflicts of each country’s respective eras and milieu. Pairing Filipino and British moving image works, the exhibition tracks the responses to these sweeping changes and, in most instances, challenges their course.
When we look at art… by Annie Cabigting
Annie Cabigting’s photorealistic paintings are compiled extensively in this exhibition. Inspired by and subverting renowned artists like Yves Klein and Mark Rothko, Cabigting inquires into the ways art is experienced and lived through. The show is a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum of Manila and Finale Art File.
If you cannot love me will you by Deirdre Camba
Showing at Anima Art Space in Quezon City, Deirdre Camba’s debut exhibition draws on and displays her sharp and incisive poetry. The show pairs her poetry with material objects such as dresses, pearls, and religious relics. These wonder-filled objects amplify Camba’s intensely desirous poetry in vivid and striking ways.
Hiding in Plain Sight
At Arte Bettina in Makati City, six artists come together to reckon with the idea of anonymity. Blurred and obscured identities linger in uneasy tension with the world. At a time when privacy and surveillance are consistently under threat by big businesses, Hiding in Plain Sight attempts to examine the implications of disappearance and anonymity through varying aesthetic perspectives.
Free Space by Celine Lee
Visual artist Celine Lee attempts to grasp the mind’s hyperactivity through the conscious act of offloading. Using the rubik’s cube as its visual motif, the show explores existential questions of memory and nostalgia within the digital space. By looking at the past through highly nuanced lenticular prints, Lee hints at the multiplicity of reality, forging a path forward into a speculative future.