On May 11, 2017, The Spectre of Comparison, the Philippine Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Art Biennale, curated by MCAD Director/Curator Joselina Cruz, features the works of Filipino artists Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo successfully held its opening ceremonies.

The Spectre of Comparison is drawn from the novel Noli Me Tángere written by the Filipino patriot and novelist Jose Rizal when living in Berlin in 1887. Originally written in Spanish, the enigmatic phrase el demonio de las comparaciones is the impulse for this exhibition and the framework for the practices of Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo, the artists representing the Philippines at this year’s Biennale.

The phrase suggests the experience of the loss of political innocence: the double-vision of experiencing events up close and from afar no longer being able to see the Philippines without seeing Europe nor gaze at Europe without seeing the Philippines. Historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson in his essay The First Filipino (1997) writes that “Here indeed is the origin of nationalism, which lives by making comparisons”. Thus Jose Rizal, the nineteenth-century indio from the colony, experienced and comprehended, from his position in Germany, the colonising European other.

Despite having aesthetically different practices influenced by distinct historical moments, Lani Maestro – whose installations incorporate sound, film, text and photographs – and Manuel Ocampo – whose figurative paintings critique systems – are both products of the “collective” experience of the émigré’s spectre. The exhibition accords this gaze to Ocampo and Maestro, not only as artists having knowledge of and lived in two, several, or many worlds, but as artists whose art-making produces a fragmented global –a discursive and complex imagining constructed through a consciousness of worlds built across temporal and geographical zones.

The Philippine participation at the Venice Biennale is a joint project of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), and the Office of Senator Loren Legarda, with the support of the Department of Tourism (DOT).

The Philippine Pavilion is located at the Artiglierie of the Arsenale in Venice, Italy and is open to the public from May 13 to November 26, 2017.

To find out more about the Philippine exhibition at the Venice Biennale, please contact the PAVB Coordinating Committee:
(+632) 527 2175
info@philartvenicebiennale.net

Photos by Paolo Lucca courtesy of Philippine Arts in Venice Biennale