Address

Alfredo + Isabel Aquilizan Lobby

EDUCATION GUIDE
The guide is designed for discussions and activities on the two exhibits for classes in Humanities, Art Studies, Fine Arts, Anthropology and Sociology. Suggested topics for this exhibition include: Installation Art, Photography, Migration and Diaspora and Collaborative Art. The Education Guide includes write-ups (set off in gray boxes), guide questions, pre-, during, and post-visit activities and suggested readings. Important terms are underlined for emphasis and possible discussion in class. It is encouraged that course tutors/teachers have a pre-visit to the exhibition before the classs actual visit. This education guide may be reproduced. VISITOR INFORMATION For pre-visits, coordinate with the Museum to schedule a group visit. Please inform the Museum at least 24 hours in advance. Group visits may be guided by a museum staff, by the teacher (the galleries may be used as classroom upon advance notification), or unguided (students may view the exhibition at their own pace). For information about the museum hours and entrance fees, check the official website of the museum at http://vargasmuseum.upd.edu.ph.

Hong Kong Intervention

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu West Wing Gallery

About Address
Alfredo + Isabel Aquilizan In Address, the artists use boxes laden with the personal effects from their homeland. This may well be a farewell scene in which the process of migration becomes poignant and the lost object of country is salvaged in pieces. It is caught between the anticipation of a beginning and an unsettling of origin or address -- between expectation and alienation. The practice of Alfredo Juan and Isabel Aquilizan indexes the habit of keeping and investing things with sentiment. It is a disposition shaped by varying desires: as a matter of necessity for a family and as a matter of contingency for artists seeking the intimate contexts of a collective, whether kin or nation, the mass or the global. It is further deepened by their experience as Filipino migrants in Australia and their commissions of installations across the world: the world is a balikbayan box, always coming home, returning to an address. Alfredo Juan Aquilizan earned his fine arts degree from the Philippine Womens University in 1986 and his masters from the Polytechnic University in Norwich, England. He draws, paints, sculpts, mixes media, does assemblages, and initiates installation projects. His work heavily draws on memory of home and country. This memory is viewed as a process of recollection, of remembering details and artifacts of a living history of people, places, and encounters. In undertaking this kind of artistic process, he collaborates with the people around him and forges connections among them. Isabel Aquilizan is a teacher and artist of the performing arts. She is a director and actress. Her engagement with the process of performance and its inherent collaborative possibilities has led her to work with her husband in installations that cross gaps between media and distances. Her role as a mother of five children enables her to intervene in recreating the art of installation as home or habitat that is sustained by housekeeping, child rearing, nurturing, and the collecting of memories.

Together, they have exhibited at biennales/triennials like Venice, Sydney, and Singapore and have been commissioned by the Tate Liverpool. They taught at the Philippine High School for the Arts and the University of the Philippines at Los Baos.

About Hong Kong Intervention

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu

In 2009, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu asked Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, who were mostly women, to plant a bogus bomb in the spaces of their choice in the well-appointed houses they worked in. They also asked them to photograph each other with their backs turned. In this project, the classic tension between purity and danger emerges more potently because it intrudes on space in which another form of anxiety takes place: between intimacy and estrangement, anonymity (facelessness and uninhabitedness) and incursion. All this settles on an uneasy calm in the pictures of this project in which the workers stealthily smuggle in a toy grenade in the homes they keep for employers whose secrets, whose interior life, they probably know to heart. It is said that a third of the Philippine population is out of the country, keeping the economy on an even keel by sending back home around 18 billion dollars a year in remittances. The body of Filipinos is a ticking migrant force in the inner sanctum of their masters. Sun Yuan was born in 1972 in Beijing, China while Peng Yu was born in 1974 in Heilongjiang, China. They both graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995 and 1998 respectively. Now living and working collaboratively in Beijing, their installations are often provocative using materials such as live animals, human blood and fluid, baby cadavers and fat tissues. Their works usually deal with life and death and confrontations of/in human condition. Some of their works are Old Peoples Home, Angel, Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, Safe Island, Body Link and Civilization Pillar. In Old Peoples Home, famous world leaders were modeled as crippled old person in electric wheelchairs turning them into powerless, impotent figures left to battle on their frail condition. Live pit bulls were placed in running machines without drive in Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other. The artists own blood were drawn and used for Body Link while human fats collected from cosmetic surgery clinics in China were cooked and molded into a pillar for the sculpture Civilization Pillar. Sun and Peng had their solo shows at Osage Gallery in Hong Kong, Tang Contemporary Art in Beijing and then Ghent Spring in Belgium. They were also part of The Revolution Continues: Nee Chinese Art at Saatchi Gallery in London, New World Order in Groninger Museum in The Netherlands and The Beauty of Distance at the 17th Biennale of Sydney.

Form: Installation and Photography

there a special occasion? Who were the people in the photograph, if theres any? What is special about the photograph? Actual visit guide questions and activities: 1. 2. View both exhibits. What are the materials the Aquilizans used for their installation? Can you see these objects in your own home? What is the relevance of the objects in your own home? What do you think is the relevance of these objects now that they are part of an installation? 3. 4. Are the boxes familiar to you? For what purposes do you use a box? Take a closer look at the photographs of the Hong Kong Intervention. What are the recurrent objects or images do you see? Do these recurring objects and images convey an idea? In your own opinion, what does it say or mean? 5. How do you look at the exhibit? Do you see the photos individually? Or do you see them as a group or as a whole? If it is the latter, can you then say that the medium is an installation instead of photography? Explain your answer. Post-visit activities: 1. Ask the students to write a paper reflecting on photography as (a) an art form by itself, (b) photography and its use in advertising and popular media, or (c) the important role that photography took part in Surrealism and Conceptual Art. 2. Ask the students to bring in class letters that they received from family, relatives and friend via postal mail. In class, take turns in taking photos of the envelopes highlighting the address and then write a short description or history of the letter. The students can then post these photos together with the write-up in their Facebook or Tumblr account. 3. The actual letters can also be used for an installation. Ask the students to curate their own exhibit using the letters, handwritten note and shared stories.

In its early formation, Installation art was defined as a medium and technique that defies permanence. However in recent years, Installation Art has become a practice that embodies the relationship between the artist and the audience. As the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov puts it, Installation Art is a genre that engages the viewer as artist infuses a sense of familiarity, drawing from everyday experiences and recognizable memories. The viewer should not merely be asked with what do I see, but with what do I feel and how would I react. The audience is encouraged to have his/her own meaning, interpretation and understanding of the artwork. Photography is both an art and science of creating images with the use of light by means of optical, mechanical and chemical recording. Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson harnessed photography as an art form by using combination printing to produce pictorial qualities akin to academic painting. In 1920s, Man Rays method of cropping and framing his photographs exemplified the practice of the Surrealist movement. The Conceptual art in 1960s also paved way to conceptual photography in which the artist makes a photograph based on a preconceived idea or concept.

Pre-visit activities: 1. Discuss with the students the concept of Installation art. Ask the students what comes first in their minds when they hear the word installation. 2. Ask the students to bring a photograph in class. Let them share stories or anecdotes about the photo. Who took the photo? Where and when was the photo taken? Was

Sources and suggested readings: De Oliveria, Nicolas et al. 2003. Installation Art in the New Millennium. London: Thomas and Hudson. Gaiger, Jason and Paul Wood, ed. 2003. Modernity and Photography in Art of the Twentieth Century. In Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader. Connecticut: Yale University Press. Flores, Patrick et al, ed. 1997. Photography in Culture. In Art and Society. Quezon City: Department of Art Studies. Pre-visit activities: 1. Ask the students if their parents, siblings or any relatives are living and working abroad. Encourage them to share their experiences and personal stories about balikbayan box. Actual visit guide questions and activities: 1. In Address, do the boxes and objects remind you of balikbayan boxes? How are the contents different from the usual balikbayan boxes? Compare the objects in the Aquilizans boxes with an ordinary OFWs balikbayan boxes. Do these objects emphasize longing and nostalgia? How do they become intimate objects when Migration is the movement of people from one location to another, most of the times from native country to another country. There are several factors why people migrate. This may be due an ongoing war, cultural and religious oppression, and the most common reasons are lack of job opportunities in his/her country and poverty. Migration can be sometimes semi-permanent, as one would only stay for the purpose of working and building a career, but eventually will settle in his/her homeland upon reaching retirement. Related to migration is the concept of diaspora, which according to Jonathan Okamura is a transnational social constructionand is socially constructed through the individual and collective actions of immigrants/migrants. These transnational relations are evident in Filipinos balikbayan boxes, remittances, and other communications that the new technology offers. The concept of community of people (e.g. Filipinos in Hong Kong) in a foreign land encompasses the diasporic experience. Moreover, overseas Filipino workers (OFW) comprise the large number of migrant workers dispersed around the globe. They are the primary source of consumer goods that are neatly packed in balikbayan boxes, which are also representations of intimacy and longing. 5. 4. 3. 2. personally packed? How do the accounts of these objects translate into the global experience? Was there a case that you changed your address? Why? Why do you think the title of the exhibit is Address? How does it relate to migration? In Hong Kong Intervention, how does the toy grenade evoke intimacy between the OFW and his/her employer? What does the chosen space of the house say about the employer-employee relationship? How does this space traverse secrecy, threat and violence? What was the effect of the portraits of the workers turned against the audience? How does it allude to being unknown, facelessness and anonymous? How do you think these Filipino overseas workers become the migrant force in Hong Kong? What are their major contributions to both Philippine and global economies?

Content: Migration, Diaspora, Overseas Filipino Workers and Belonging

Post-visit activities: 1. Divide the class into three or four groups, depending on the size of the class. Each group must bring one balikbayan box and put stuff in the box that for them expresses intimate family ties. Outside the box, each member of the group could write a message. Then the class can display this as an installation. 2. Ask the students to write an essay about migration and diaspora. They can focus on different subthemes such as (a) the effect in the relationship between the migrant worker and the family that is left behind, (b) the migrant workers as bagong bayani or modern day heroes, or (c) the economic effect of migration in local and global market due to remittances and the dwindling state of the labor force in the Philippines. Sources and suggested readings: Actual visit guide questions and activities: Okamura, Jonathan. 1998. Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora: Transnational Relations, Identities, and Communities. New York: Garland Publishing. San Juan E. 2000.Trajectories of the Filipino Diaspora. Ethnic Studies Report Vol XVIII, No. 2: 229-238 1. How do you think did Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan create their installation collaboratively? What are the common interests and experiences they share as a couple? Do you think these are evident with their work? Expound your answer. 2. In Hong Kong Intervention, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu asked Filipino domestic helpers to put toy grenade in one area of the house where they work and then take a photo of the place. The artists provided the workers with disposable cameras. In this way, Pre-visit activities: 1. Ask the students if they have experienced collaborating or working for a project with another person. Engage them in a discussion by retelling the experiences of their collaborative work. 2. Discuss in class the concept of collaborative work. For easier comprehension, the teacher can give the collaboration between the songwriter and composer as an example. the artists and the Filipino workers collaborated for this project. Who then owns the work? In your own opinion, where does the collaboration start and end? What happens to the product then? In what way can collaboration between communities be sustainable? 3. Identify various collaborations that may have taken place in two exhibitions and how the artists, communities, and institutions realized the collaboration. Collaborative art projects have been an active practice in the art scene in the new decade. Collaboration between artists from different fields (e.g. visual artists, musicians, designers, theater actors and so on), communities, art and cultural institutions and even private sectors is gaining momentum in the field of art production and exhibition. Close-knit collaborations and artist couples also sprang up at the end of 1960s eliminating the concept of the artist as an individual. Collaborations between couples and members of the nuclear family last longer (or even lifetime) in contrast with collectives that are mostly shortlived. Moreover, collaboration of the artist/s with the members of a certain community also poses inquiries on authority and authenticity.

Method: Collaboration

Post-visit activities: 1. As a project/collaboration, ask the class to make either a music video or a documentary video. The class must agree upon a certain topic, theme or concept. Upload the video in YouTube after and share it with other classes. 2. Ask the students to do a collaborative drawing or painting with parents, siblings or friends. The artwork should focus on their shared experiences. Sources and suggested readings: Green, Charles. 2001. The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.