Issue 15 - Pdf Ctrl+P - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

and Raymundo Albano of the Philippines. This exhibition of art works, texts, and documentation
of curatorial initiations surfaced a range of problematics: the role of the hybrid
personage like the artist-curator; the transformation of the trope of curator in makeshift
modernities, and the intimation of a discourse of the avant-garde in Southeast Asia.
Okwui titled the biennale Annual Report. It was not framed by any theme. In fact,
he would say that there is in the present a crisis in thematic exhibitions: the biennale
could be an occasion for a pause or an introspection as well as a retrospection. I think my
proposal fit into this scheme, because it was in the same vein a way of looking back at the
seventies in Southeast Asia, the Cold War, the formation of civil society and democracy,
and the heady times of the nineties when exhibitions in Asia and the Pacific began to
draft their own cartographies. According to Okwui,
These exhibitions, proposals, processions, and activities can be understood
as a chain of traveling cultural worlds and idioms; a network of incommensurable
experiments in global culture within the contemporary calendar.
Whether originating from a shopping mall, a folk theater, a makeshift display
in neigh borhood, alternative gallery systems, non-profit institutions, local
cultural centers, or the commercial gallery circuit, art fairs, museums,
festivals, and a wide array of exhibition systems and spaces, the biennale’s
goals is to illuminate the adventure-time and everyday localities of contempo
rary artistic practice…In presenting these exhibitions, proposals, and projects,
the biennale does not aim for one singular dominant vision, nor will it assume
any sense of grandiose authorship. But by linking together the work of many
curators, artists, institutions, and galleries, the objective is to achieve within
the biennale a forum of collective authorship.
Ray Albano. Step on the Sand and
Make Footprints. (a reconstruction).
Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator
exhibition, 7th Gwangju Biennale, 2008.
Photo courtesy of Gwangju Biennale
It was propitious that Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator was presented beside the
Whitney Museum retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark, another eccentric artist who
intuited everyday life in Manhattan through architectural interventions. With this tangent,
the whole notion of conceptualism across art worlds gained new depth, and not because
of a provincial articulation from Southeast Asia, a vernacular variation, as it were, but
because of an equivalent locution from an alternative vantage.
21 Ctrl+P September 2009