TuTOK Kargado

February for Filipinos has, of recent, meant more than apartelle valentines: February celebrates Art practice as well as people’s participation in change, as embodied by EDSA 1986. TuTOK KARGADO at the Ateneo Art Gallery, which opens on February 26, partakes of all these. It embraces a fervid romance for nation and identity, using visual arts bent towards the populist as the engine of change, self-recognition and self-acceptance. It joins an artistic project with roots as deep as Tomas Pinpin, Damian Domingo and Juan Luna, and includes those whose works in the 70s led to KAISAHAN’s Social Realism. Add to this artists from the nationalistic Hiraya Gallery, Salingpusa, Sanggawa, Ugat Lahi, Anino Shadowplay Collective, New World Disorder, Anting-Anting and even the Mandaya tribe of Davao Oriental. It also showcases of fresh batch of 21^st century players addressing the anxious landscape of a millenium yet to unfold.

TuTOK KARGADO is an agitated dialogue between a post-modern community and the high modern collection of the Ateneo Art Gallery. KARGADO examines nationhood, modernism, critical self-recognition, political complexity, and proposes that art practice comes with an inseparable charge, a context, an implication that cannot be distilled away into absolute form but has to be grafted and manifest by and in such form to fully address the era it came from. The anxieties of Y2k08 – homogenizing globalisation, climate change, hegemony and extremism have prodded artists to either dissect contemporaneity or provide perishable cocoons of indifference. TuTOK KARGADO chooses dissection.

This dissection becomes engaging when shaped as visual discourse between masters such as Arturo Luz, Vicente Manansala, J. Elizalde Navarro, Roberto Chabet, Antonio Austria, Brenda Fajardo, Lazaro Soriano, among others, and current practitioners such as Edgar Talusan Fernandez, Manny Garibay, Alfredo Esquillo, Noel Soler Quizon, Karen O Flores, Jose Tence Ruiz, Boy Dominguez, Mideo Cruz, Mark Salvatus, Buen Calubayan, Jay Pacena, Lav Diaz, Jim Libiran, Don Salubayba and Kirby Roxas. This discourse encompasses painting, installation and video and is curated by Jose Tence Ruiz.