Dates: Wednesday, 28 May 2025 to Sunday, 24 August 2025
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Design and Arts Campus (D+A Campus), Dominga Street, Malate, Manila
Moments of Delay questions the notions and conditions of contemporaneity. This exhibition and program draws from art critic Boris Groys, who wrote about the contemporary as “a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay”—a period constituted by doubt and hesitation. It means to live with uncertainty, as both a rupture and a pause, a turbulent condition of both longing for and existing in the past and future, while dealing with the anxieties of the present. Through this premise, we think through the contemporary moment as influenced by, and are manifestations of, both distant and recent pasts as well as projections and hopes into our futures.
Departing from Groys, Moments of Delay attempts to complicate our understanding of time and the contemporary moment. Today, in the Philippines, and much like elsewhere, we grapple with unpredictability in governance, environment, finances, and a conception of a liveable future. We seek to capture this uncertain time through various perspectives and artistic approaches, across a range of analog, current, and obsolete technologies. Between site-specific installations, generated imagery, sound, and painting, the artists in this exhibition and program speak to different facets of a contemporary world marked by doubt. These artists reference local concerns, addressing political calls and disinformation, together with poetic gestures alluding to public space, history, and the immaterial.
Moments of Delay examines contemporaneity through an exhibition that includes public programming as an integral component, bridging together material and immaterial expressions of artists, their work, practice, and concerns. Through a range of formats—exhibition-making, workshops, artist-led activities, and panel discussions—the artists in this program reveal different facets and strategies to comprehend our contemporary time and its delays.
A rarity in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila’s usual programming, this presentation builds upon the 2015 exhibition The Vexed Contemporary, which sought to complicate the positioning of art practices in local and global spaces that make up the art world. Moments of Delay proposes approaches to understanding time and the contemporary, addressing how artistic practice has been used as ways to probe individual and collective experiences, as reactions to specific conditions and speculations on a future, approaching “delay” as a fractured, yet expansive temporal state.
Moments of Delay brings together fourteen artists—Allan Balisi, Rocky Cajigan, Lesley-Anne Cao, Ronyel Compra, Uri de Ger, Celine Lee, Christina Lopez, Neo Maestro, Corinne de San Jose, Joar Songcuya, Cristian Tablazon, Tambisan sa Sining, Tropikalye, and Miguel Lorenzo Uy—to weed through the tensions and contradictions emerging from local contexts, looking inward yet with multiple trajectories responding to the fluidity of time, plural realities, and urgent concerns of the present.
