Geronimo Cristobal

Author: admin

  • Rodel Tapaya/ Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

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    Rodel Tapaya Can’t See the Forest for the TreesJack Bell Gallery (London, UK)May 2023 In this series of portraits filled with lush flora and fauna, Rodel Tapaya signals an intellectual turn to the ecocentric, spotlighting nature as the primary actor in the folklore that fuels his artistic imagination. The composition recalls a peculiar Southeast Asian artifact:…

  • What is Islam (Shahab Ahmed, 2015)

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    First page of the manuscript of Hafez Shirazi’s Divan. Preserved in the Treasury of the National Library and Museum of Malek, Tehran Using encyclopedic historical and theological data, Shahad Ahmed criticizes the unsatisfactory ways Islam has been taken as an object and category, and conceptualized in popular and academic discourses. According to Ahmed, a valid…

  • Inscrutable Surface

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    Java – Topeng: Ken Angrok.: Wayang Topeng play “Ken Angrok” performance at Java Institute, Jogjakarta [Yogyakarta]. Photo: NYPL/ Claire Holt Vivian Huang’s first book, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, examines the ways in which Asian and Asian American artists have advantageously reconfigured the erstwhile detrimental stereotype of inscrutability as “a dynamic antiracist,…

  • Questioning Secularism (Agrama, 2011)

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    Hussein Ali Agrama’s Questioning Secularism distills the layers of the modern nation and exposes the entrenchment of a ‘deep-state’ that works for a political elite. He describes how revolutionary legitimacy is often undermined in favor of a liberal secularism, which is both the mode in which the state wields power over belligerent citizens and the…

  • Gender / Sexuality / Theory of Power

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    Harry Styles at the Grammy Awards in 2021. Boas are a fashion must-have at Styles’ concerts.(Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP) In “Bodies with New Organs” Jasbir Puar examines the neoliberal appropriation of the trans body to reconstitute the pool of able bodied individuals for economic productivity and the development of the national economy. According…

  • Queer Companions (Omar Kasmani, 2022)

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    Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan An illustration of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine in Sehwan as it was in mid-1800s. Photo: Sindh Culture Department Lauren Berlant writes that unexpected consequences of communicating with meager signs and gestures are the “secret epitaphs” of intimacy. “Often brief and eloquent,” intimate situations also convey an aspiration…

  • Knot of the Soul (Stefania Pandolfo, 2018)

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    Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam The 72nd chapter of the Qur’an entitled Al-Jinn (The Jinn), as well as the heading and introductory bismillah of the next chapter entitled al-Muzzammil (The Enshrouded One). In Knot of the Soul, Pandolfo ties together seemingly disparate areas of study such as madness and cartography to address, among many others, the compatibility of modern psychology and Islamic eschatology. Towards this end, she…

  • Jinnealogy (Anand Vivek Taneja, 2017)

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    Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi Taneja’s plaiting of themes in contemporary Indian politics and vestiges of unsanctioned Islamic practice reveal the multi-layered undercurrents of Islamic sovereignty that shape the present. Her insights into secularism, political ecology, ethics, and religiosity afford us a deeper look of Islamic ethics and its…

  • Rouge (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1987)

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    Critics hailed Stanley Kwan’s genre defining ghost film Rogue during its Criterion Collection release as a beautiful allegorical melodrama, “the likes of which are no longer done in the West”. Bliss Cua Lim offers a reason why this is the case: “ghostly women embody a strong notion of spatiotemporal nonsynchronism—the existence of noncontemporaneous aspects of…

  • Area/ Region

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    Walker Gavin’s article “The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area” tells us that some of Michel Foucault’s ideas on biopower can still be improved. According to Gavin, Foucault didn’t think past the spatial term “territory” to consider the even more ambiguous term “area”, which according to Gavin is more encompassing of the unboundedness…

  • Semicoloniality, Agency and Occupation

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    The Bogor Botanical Gardens was officially established by the Dutch East Indies Government on May 17, 1817, which became an important part in the history of science in Indonesia. (Wikimedia Commons) In Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Ann Laura Stoler writes about the central role of the construction of race and empires in…

  • Machete of Paete and other Petrified Idols of Underdevelopment

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    Machete Poster and sculpture by Paloy Cagayat. Photo: Lakan Sining. The town of Paete, Laguna in the Philippines is an artisanal community famous for its living tradition of wood carving of religious santos. In 1580, the town came under the administration of Spanish friars Juan de Plasencia and Diego de Oropesa, who encountered a native…

  • Grupos Filipinos Ilustres, 1911

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    Photo: Grupos Filipinos Ilustres, NCCA/ National Museum Collection This lithograph called Grupos Filipinos Ilustres by Guillermo Tolentino from 1911, created the National Pantheon according to historian Resil Mojares. It imagined heroes, intellectuals, artists, activists and politicians together in a studio portrait. It was a popular fixture in homes during the American occupation of the Philippines,…

  • Lingua Franca (2019, dir. Isabel Sandoval)

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    Isabel Sandoval plays Olivia, a caregiver to Olga played by Lynn Cohen. Filipino director and actress Isabel Sandoval paints the portrait of freedom, inspired by her own journey as a transgender migrant in Donald Trump’s America. Alongside filmmakers Lav Diaz and Brillante Mendoza, Sandoval is among a new breed of filmmakers who are committed witnesses…

  • Manta Ray (dir. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, 2018)

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    There is a stealthiness and a dreaminess in Manta Ray (2018), the first feature film by cinematographer Phuttiphong Aroonpheng who was born in 1976. The film is one of the first fiction films to evoke the crisis of the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority in western Burma (Myanmar), from the perspective of Thailand, the land…

  • Bulletproof Equations

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    Preliminary Investigation Into The Possible Origins of Agimat Burmese Yantra Jacket, vegetable ink on cotton, date unknown, Collection: Herbert Johnson Museum. Photo: Author In his memoirs, Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) recalls a story from Soemarsaid Moertono (1922-1987), his Indonesian fellow student in the mid-1960s who showed him drafts of his MA thesis on aspects of traditional…

  • Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)

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    In Cemetery of Splendor, characters dispense zen-like nuggets of wisdom in a lethargic state. Paced like a Buddhist meditation, the plot marches to a slow and subtle but abundant poetic song under the branches of psychotropic jungles, crossed by bizarre animals, tropical diseases, erotic projections, and otherworldly light. Undoubtedly less bewitching than the previous opuses…

  • Protected: David Medala/ Parables of Friendship

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    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • Protected: Andi Taku E Sana, Amung Taku Di Sana / All of us Present, This is our Gathering

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    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • Bophana (dir. Rithy Panh, 1996)

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    Filmmaker Rithy Panh’s passionate story of the Cambodian national tragedy is told through a documentary centered on the enduring love of two of its victims. Panh, who was interned in a Khmer Rouge labor camp before finding refuge in France, returned to a Cambodia traumatized by a massacre that saw the obliteration of a good…

  • The Lover (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992)

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                The Lover (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992)  is not the typical epic historical romance in the same way as Gone With the Wind might be but it plays on the same elements. While the plot of this well-worn genre revolves around the loss of innocence—which is often an allegory for the colonial experience—and of having…

  • Let’s Love Hongkong (dir. Yau Ching, 2002)

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                In Let’s Love Hongkong (dir. Yau Ching, 2002), the metropolis is presented as a lesbian dystopia where affections constantly get waylaid and no one seems to fall in love with the right person. Instead, everyone is addicted to cheap thrills and devices. The film revolves around the lives of three lesbians in Y2K-era Hong…

  • Rama Hari

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    In November 2017, the Times of India published a story about Prime Minister Narendra Modi applauding a ballet performance based on the Ramayana during the opening of the ASEAN Summit in Manila. According to Modi, the event which was attended by Donald Trump, Shinzo Abe, Joko Widodo, and Rodrigo Duterte among many others, shows India…

  • Children of Srikandi (2012)

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    George McT Kahin wrote in his Introduction to Benedict Anderson’s Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (1965) that “anyone interested in contemporary Indonesia, its organization and social and political articulation… comes to realize that in order to achieve any real depth of understanding for these phenomena, it is first necessary to appreciate the enduring…

  • Marriage (Mas Ruscitadewi, 1995)

    Marriage (Mas Ruscitadewi, 1995)

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    Eave hanging (ider-ider) with scenes from the Baratayuda (Great Battle) from the Mahabharata, Ink and pigments on handwoven cotton cloth 18th-early 19th century, 39 3/8 × 276 3/4 inches (100 × 703 cm). Donated originally by Claire Holt and Ben Anderson and transferred from the Echols Collection at Cornell University’s Kroch Library. Photo: Collection of…

  • Mystery Object

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    This brass cylinder is made distinctive by the incisions of figures that resemble reliefs from temples or medieval goblets. Roughly a meter high, the object is shaped like a lighthouse, with a conical head that detaches from the neck. The shape of a lotus bud is inscribed at the tip of this head which can…

  • (The Eye, dir. Pang & Pang, 2008)

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    Traumas and wounds become embodied indexes of a nation’s technological and cultural transformation in the film, The Eye (2008). The horror story centers on 20-year old Wong Kar Mun, a Hong kong classical violinist who undergoes an eye cornea transplant. Regaining her sense of sight should be a blessing for Wong, but it becomes more…

  • Archive Style (Robin Kelsey, 2007)

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    Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), Black Cañon, From Camp 8, Looking Above, 1871, Albumen silver print from glass negative, 20 x 28.1 cm (7 7/8 x 11 1/16 in. ) Photo: Public Domain/ Metropolitan Museum of New York Survey photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan, is known for depicting the atrocities of the American Civil…

  • Mae Nak (dir. Pimpaka Towira, 1992)

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    Images of devotion form the nexus of Thai religions and social life. As shown by Justin McDaniel’s ethnography on the shrines of Mae Nak, a well-known Thai female ghost based on a mother who dies in childbirth during the reign of King Rama IV (1804-1868). In his article, “The Agency Between Images,” McDaniel recounts his…

  • Nang Nak (dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)

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    Nak’s glorious appearance on the world stage made it “possible to ‘think’ the nation”[1] and to perceive the present as a continuation of a historical past. Nang Nak was among the first blockbuster ghost films to circulate in Southeast Asia at the turn of the millennium. This cycle of films touched on the troubled psyche…