‘Moments of Delay’ Meditates on the Realities of Contemporary Art

Moments of Delay, showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) in the College of Saint Benilde Manila, seeks to impart a more meditative perspective on contemporary art today. Most of the artworks respond to a world shaped by harmful societal systems—where everything, from work to leisure to the passing of time, is pressured to move faster.

The exhibit, held in a spacious two-storey expanse at MCAD, equips the audience with the environment that provokes calmness into people. It’s an exhibit built to make you feel time pass by slowly, to linger on those moments. 

From there, with that mood of halted time built, curators Arianna Mercado and James Tana present a portrait of the contemporary world that critiques its inability to let people breathe and just be. From workers’ rights to technological exploitation, and the tension between city and provincial life, it reckons with the continuing ripple effects shaping society today. 

“The idea of delay or the suspension of time opens up a space and creates moments where alternative conceptions of time and its possibilities can exist, and moreso, be argued or disputed,” the curators wrote in their exhibit write-up. 

‘Moments of Delay’ and Slowing Down 

Moments of Delay’s use of the vast exhibition space intuits the idea of a world infinitely larger than our minds can comprehend. One of the things that social media does, for example, is make the world smaller, placing things from halfway around the world closer right at our fingertips. 

But for this exhibit, a lot of the pieces play around with the concept of slowness, of waiting. There’s a lot of empty spaces in between works, and at times it feels utilized to encourage wandering, a way of taking one’s time to absorb all the work displayed. 

Some of the more prominent creations explicitly work with the idea of time. Lesley-Anne Co’s “If time is an arrow, what is its target” is a mix of wax and silicon rubber being melted under a heat lamp. Audiences can see the dips and chasms in the piece as it melts over time, over and over during exhibition hours. It really highlights the slow changes that everything undergoes as time crawls forward. 

“It is a work in slow motion and constant change,” the exhibit write-up said. “[The work is] evolving according to the gallery’s temperature, the hour one visits, and the exhibition duration.”

Symbolism Beyond the Straightforward

Rocky Cajigan’s “A barrier, a time II” gives gallery visitors a pathway made up of threads of different colors. It spans around half the exhibition, with a small divot in its path to showcase a soutane—a cassock worn by Catholic priests—decorated with human hair. 

Previously exhibited in 2019 at Patan, Nepal, the work represents the necessity of repetition and rigor to achieve the outcomes one wants. The multicolored threads running through the exhibit, for example, represent the queer rights movement, “a series of collective actions represented by the historical transformation of the rainbow flag.” The cassock, meanwhile, is a localization of the original idea of representing “movements and iconographies at the core of religious rituals.”

Its mazelike structure portrays the lack of straightforwardness that life provides for what we have. Where we want to go is not as easy to get to as we want it to be, and sometimes it forces us into new places we never contemplated going to. 

Art That Takes Its Time

Another work, Ronyel Compra’s “Pouring a million earth into a hollowed star,” is a video of a provincial basketball game projected onto the floor of MCAD. The video is an aerial view of the court, and there’s a sense of alienation as you watch it from such a godlike perspective. 

From a certain viewpoint, one can see it as a way of questioning the meaning of documentation as a whole. Camera, video, cinema, these tend to be seen as a way of giving us a closer perspective of a subject or event; but do they actually do that, or is it more of an illusion of closeness and understanding of the subject? Maybe it just mimics intimacy, giving us a glimpse of truth without really needing to delve deeper within. 

“The artist draws on the contrast between territories and boundaries, between public space and the personal, between reconstructing memories and the urge to pause for a moment to reflect on them in the present,” the exhibit write-up said. 

Alienation from our world is a recurring theme, from Tambisan sa Sining’s protest mural for workers’ rights to Christina Lopez’s “Portraits (Proxies),” which was made in 2020 with an early generative-AI-esque prototype that allowed her to morph images together into an incomprehensible whole. 

A Different Future for Art and Society

The exhibit shows the need for calm, steady minds willing to see the bigger picture of what’s happening. In a world grappling with unprecedented challenges, we need moments of pause—to reflect on where we are and consider how we move forward.

“[The exhibit is] not seeking to be definitive,” the exhibit write-up said, “but rather to operate within strategies that explore the varying embodiments of the looping and cyclical nature of time.”

As an exhibition, Moments of Delay forces us to contemplate our preconceptions of art and society. The intentionality in analyzing time works to expand the viewer’s imagination on how and where art—and society—can move towards; a breather, in the midst of the chaotic push of time. 

Moments of Delay will be open at MCAD until August 24. Different talks and programs are scheduled to occur across the next few months; the schedules are available on their website.

Photos by Elle Yap.

Related reading: Living Innovations Presents “A Toast to Tranquility” at its New Showroom

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