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Past Fernando Zóbel Prizes Winners Showcase Works in New Exhibit
Ateneo Art Gallery paid tribute to four past winners of the Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art with a return exhibition that showcased the most recent works of the artist. The new exhibit opened during the Ateneo Art Awards in 2024, which honored three writers with the Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prizes in Art Criticism.
The Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prize in Art Criticism
Established in 2004, the Ateneo Art Awards started as a contemporary art prize before expanding into written criticism in 2014. This year, the focus came to the Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prizes for Art Criticism. Eight shortlisted entries were submitted for the award: six in English, and two in Filipino.
Two English writers, Chesca Santiago and Levi Masuli, won the award for their respective contributions “Against Community as Moral Currency” and “All That Is Useful Lends To Waste.” One Filipino writer, Ryan Cezar Alcarde, also won for their contribution “Line of sight.”
Masuli received a year-long monthly column at the Philippine Star as a prize. Santiago will contribute six articles to ArtAsiaPacific, with Alcarde receiving “the chance to contribute a total of two (2) articles to the bi-annual research publication for a year.” Masuli and Alcarde are also the recipients of a month-long writers’ residency for The White House in Zambales. Santiago won the month-long writers’ residency for the Orange Project Naranja Residency.
The shortlisted essays can be read here.
Fernando Zóbel Visual Arts Return Exhibition
As the Fernando Zóbel Prizes will be awarded this year, the return exhibition allowed the gallery to focus on the contributions of four previous winners of the award. This aimed to showcase the importance of these artworks in addressing different societal issues using the technology that we have today.
“The Return Exhibition features works that reflect contemporary issues such as climate change and degradation of the environment and advances in digital technology,” the exhibit write-up said.
The four artists featured were KoloWn, Ronson Culibrina, Christina Lopez, and Keb Cedra.
Seeking Roots to the Past
Ronson Culibrina’s contributions to the exhibition rely the least on new technologies. His works are largely sculptural intimations of the past, depicting Filipino cultural symbols in vivid, memorable ways.
A giant slipper surrounded by colorful strips of paper greets exhibit-goers entering his portion of the exhibit. Other works include the “Pukot” series, which appears to drown sculptures of everyday objects in green slime. “Hybreed” covers a pot of flowers with a tar-like substance.
All of it evokes a kind of subversive rendering of Philippine provincial life. Juxtaposed with some of the more traditional paintings in the exhibit, Culibrina depicts the grime of modern life and how many people deal with or shrug off such eccentricities.
“Employing a playful approach to his practice, Ronson Culibrina uses psychedelia to delve into issues concerning local history and politics, the environment and the Filipino diaspora,” the exhibit write-up said. “He juxtaposes hallucinogenic and muted colors in his oil paintings, tracing a landscape marred by contemporary ecological and socio-political conflicts.”
Evolution of Media Today
As an artist, KoloWn is described as a “multifaceted entity encompassing an artist, a network, applications, and bots.” Their artworks merge different technological advances to peer through the way people use our spaces in the modern age.
“From the idea of colonialism, their initial mission was to kolownize all possible spaces through collaboration, crowdsourcing and automation,” the gallery said.
Ghostwriter, the work featured in this exhibit, utilizes a large language model to create sci-fi stories with words contributed by the audience. The program also sources Philippine news headlines for the story ideas. These machine-generated stories, renewed every day, are projected onto a wall. A small screen on the side displays the cluster of submitted words to the audience members in the gallery.
“The work is a response to the proliferation of fake news, the possible impact of AI in our lives. The sources came from real-time news headlines,” KoloWn said in their website about Ghostwriter. “The work is inspired on how we sometimes consume news based on headlines without reading the whole article and how some news sources create click-baity headlines that are sometimes far from its content.”
Contemporary Art, Contemporary Issues
Moving through the exhibition space, another visual artist, Keb Cerda, also attempts to engage with the technology of our world today. Cedra’s contributions, however, utilize a sort of ‘50s kitsch which playfully engages with people’s nostalgia.
“His practice centers on the idea of digital interactive games as a powerful means of storytelling,” the exhibit write-up said.
Alpha Build contains three mini-games crafted by Cedra: “Dahlia,” “Atomic Blob,” and “Dopamine Dash.” These games operate through an augmented reality of some sort or another. For example, “Dahlia” can only be played through a phone app while pointed at the painting. “Dopamine Dash,” meanwhile, allows audiences to interact with it through a motion sensor as the game is projected on the screen.
Commentary Through Gaming
The most traditional game of the three is “Atomic Blob,” an airplane shoot-’em-up arcade machine. Cedra surrounds the kitschy scroller arcade game with a gaudy, ostentatious ‘50s living room set straight out of a nuclear test site, complete with a painting of a group of soldiers looking straight at a mushroom cloud.
All of these come together as a self-described “mini-retrospective,” and a way to exemplify the storytelling capabilities of gaming altogether.
“Keb Cerda’s works blur the lines between traditional and digital media by offering viewers a synesthetic journey that allows them to view his works and physically interact with it, making them active participants in the dialogue of the future of society at the hands of technology,” the write-up said.
Mythmaking and Machine-Learning
Artist Christina Lopez looks at how we construct meaning and purpose in images through the way we display them. Her contribution to the exhibit, “non-monoliths,” puts together portraits, paintings, and “monuments” to create an evocative portrayal of culture creation in today’s society.
“She focuses in particular on the material impact of visual culture by exploring how image-making can be shaped by the physicality and virtuality of manufacturing culture, as well as technical abstractions such as social media algorithms and big data,” the write-up said.
Works like “Untitled (Obelisks)” show the detritus of culture-building. This one contains pointed obelisks toppled down over each other, a commentary on society’s instability. “Sirens,” meanwhile, puts viewers into a dark room where one spotlight shines through different faces painted on the walls.
Some of the works, like “All of the girls, at this point in time [Ana, Mandy, and Me]” utilize machine-learning technologies to craft an evolving portrait of identity in our culture. At times, the data scraped off the Internet shows the unrealistic beauty standards imposed upon women. It changes right before our very eyes, stretching and contorting in disturbing ways to bring us the image of the characters.
Different zines explaining Lopez’s concept were also present at the exhibit.
Bringing Meaning to Technology
The exhibition of past winners of the Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art demonstrates the vitality of artistic expression in making sense of our modern-day existence. Without it, the jumble of technologies advancing our lives would be rendered meaningless.
These artists, however, ground the works in strong ideas and humanistic leaning. It brings a sense of purpose to machines that often cannot conceive of these ideas itself.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: ‘Transitions and Continuity’ Provokes Questions in Creating Video Art
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