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For the past few decades, the centrality of Manila's place in the history of art in the Philippines has been continually interrogated, not least because of the dispersals of the archipelagic terrain of the Philippines, opening up cultural discourses in Manila to a constellation of localities, regions and other forms of coexistences. Three recent exhibitions fleshed out this milieu: 'Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia' curated by Patrick D Flores, which brought together an intergenerational exhibition of art in the region spread over three venues; 'Gendered Bodies in Southeast Asia' curated by Tessa Maria Guazon and Taiwanese curator Fang-Tze Hsu, an exhibition on the complexities of gender in the region and across generations; and 'Transpersonal, Instructions' curated by Stephen Wilson, which focused on the rubric of the 'transpersonal' as it disperses implications of the personal into questions of ecology, the anthropocene and the nonhuman - invoking a shared vulnerability in the world with others.
Materialising a region in the context of these exhibitions becomes a work of recognising comparisons and their resonances. To paraphrase curator and art historian Ahmad Mashadi, understanding regionalities involves appreciating contexts and conditions that encumber interactions, exchanges, dependencies and the sharing of experiences. To think about regions is to invoke a vaster world that unsettles inveterate nationalisms, opening up the national to often errant identifications with the Southeast Asian, the colonial, the modern or postmodern.
In 'Ties of History', the strategy to exhibit in three venues, with each of the ten artists presenting a work of specific persuasion per venue, unsettles the imagination of the region and opens it up to the particularity of generation and artistic life and practice. The works of Vuth Lyno and Chris Chong Chan Fui further flesh out this approach to regionality as comparability and resonance. Vuth's 25, for example, is a video documentary which follows the legacy of the United Nations Transitional Authority...