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Rama Hari
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…
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Children of Srikandi (2012)
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…
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Mystery Object
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…
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(The Eye, dir. Pang & Pang, 2008)
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…
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Archive Style (Robin Kelsey, 2007)
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…
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Mae Nak (dir. Pimpaka Towira, 1992)
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…
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Nang Nak (dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)
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…
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The Age of Barbarians
The Age of Enlightenment is commonly thought to precede the rapid development of history as an academic discipline. An awareness of history and the perceived continuity of peoples and nations caused a rapid evolution in the field of applied arts and architecture. This can be observed in the revival of historical styles in painting as…
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The Sentimental Masks of Marcos and Robredo
Abstract How is charisma generated and transformed in the 2022 Philippine Presidential elections? This paper weighs in on the critical discussion of propaganda and political branding, using melodrama and political emotion as lenses to examine the rivalry between Leni Robredo and Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. These two candidates enacted charismatic leadership within online spaces and reworked…
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May Tenga Ang Lupa
Rodel TapayaDrawing Room GalleryJune-July 2022 May tenga ang lupa, may pakpak ang balita (The land has ears, the news has wings) is an aphorism that reminds us not only that contemporary realities have ancient roots but also that nonhuman actors matter in telling the story. In Rodel Tapaya’s own words, it is these stories that…
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Pensionado Modernists: US-educated Filipino Artists and the Struggle for Independence
Abstract The history of American modern art has largely excluded the US empire in its narrative and overlooked the massive direct investments in art education by the US government and private institutions during the 20th century. This essay revisits archival sources on two generations of Filipino pensionados, who were educated during the American colonization of…
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Gleaning from the Archives of the Pensionado Story
From 1903 to 1943, over 14,000 Filipino scholars were sent to the United States to study under a U.S. colonial scholarship called the Pensionado Program. The story of the program was documented in 1943 by Kenneth Munden, Assistant Archivist in the Division of Interior Department Archives, at the behest of the office of the Secretary…
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Christian Kruik Van Adrichem’s Theatrum Terrae Sanctae: A 16th Century Mnemonic Pilgrimage to Jerusalem
Abstract The essay examines an original map of Jerusalem drawn in 1584 by Christian Kruik van Adrichem (1533-1585), a Dutch theologian and humanist. The fold-out map, which was intended to be a historical and devotional guide based on accounts of travelers, portrayed an imagined Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, including the City of David…
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Rodel Tapaya Info
Profile for http://www.rodeltapayaart.com Rodel Tapaya Filipino, Born 1980 Rodel Tapaya’s alternative forms of understanding time and place refuse to see indigenous epistemologies and storytelling traditions as anachronisms. While folklore is often disparaged as a vestige of superstitious thought, Tapaya suggests them as a mode of resistance to the primacy of modern subjectivity and modernist form.“My…
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La Collectioneusse (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
While Eric Rohmer’s cinema is appreciated for its study of human mores, his approach to art is still little known. However, there is a Matisse in a room in Pauline à la Plage (1983), Mondrian’s Neo-plastic architecture in Nuits de la plein lune (1984), or even a Picasso in Rendezvous in Paris (1995). ). The…
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins on BROADCAST
Teodulo Protomartir is recognized as a vanguard of Philippine photography despite the meager biographical research on his life. More information has come to light from the generous input of those who knew him and followed his work since I turned the article in to the editors. I hope to include those bits in the next…
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On Artist Interviews
Originally titled “Remaining in conversation,” this is a short introduction to the interview section of Holding Everything Dear (SVA, 2021). The artist interview in Western art has its roots in the dialogue tradition exemplified by Francisco de Hollanda’s Da pintura antigua (1548) and Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della Pittura (1557), both of which are important sources…
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The Case of Daniel Folkmar
This is a digest of Campomanes, Oscar V. “Images of Filipino Racialization in the Anthropological Laboratories of the American Empire: The Case of Daniel Folkmar.” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1692-699. Accessed November 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501971 American Studies scholar Oscar Campomanes brought my attention to the work in physical anthropology of Daniel Folkmar (1861–1932). Like…
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From the Archive: Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection
The counter-gaze in the Real Photo Postcard (RPPC) of an “Igorote group” “Igorote Group”, Photo: Dean Worcester Collection- No names provided Among the recently digitized photographs from the Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection is an RPPC of a group of six young Igorots. Nothing much is written about the Igorots on the front or verso of…
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Holding Everything Dear (2021)
Wrote a short section introduction to Holding Everything Dear (2021), a compilation of selected writings from Degree Critical edited by Jessica Holmes, Lune Ames, and Cigdem Asatekin. Foreword by David Levi Strauss and afterword by Nancy Princenthal. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dgVMcIXx29uHVCT3DV6Z5vLEH-8l4d_T/view
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Perpetual Motion on Broadcast
My recent piece on tragedy and displacement in the work of Katsushika Hokusai, Constancio Bernardo, and Josef Albers on Broadcast by Pioneer Works. https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/perpetual-motion-geronimo-cristobal
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The Ignorant Schulmeister and his Armchair Revolution
This essay is a preliminary examination of the artistic pedagogy of Josef Albers mainly using his encounter with Constancio Bernardo, his student at Yale School of Art in the 1950s, as a case study. After being mentored by Albers, Bernardo made the earliest examples of modern abstract painting in Southeast Asia. Drawing from Jacques Ranciere’s…
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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis
Covering subjects outside the mainstream of early twentieth century swing and jazz music, the blues point to more than one kind of voice involved in the act of telling. Angela Davis suggests a multiplicity and fluidity prohibited by the homogenizing structuring of narration and community in mainstream music.[1] Through her transcription and analysis of the…
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Manifest Domesticity
Amy Kaplan posits that the domestic space exists as a malleable third realm between the nation and the foreign.[1] Among the variables that shape the “domestic” are the modes of domestication, rhetorics of family, and femininity. Amy Kaplan uses the concept to examine literary discourses that “use images of women and domesticity to obscure or…
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“Jennifer’s Butt” by Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Frances Negrón-Muntaner talks about the way both Selena’s and Jennifer Lopez’s rear ends are viewed by fellow audiences under circumstances that feared the racialized body before popular culture decided that a massive gluteus was cinematically desirable.[1] Latin-American teenagers perceived the uncanny doubling of Selena and Jennifer Lopez as tethered to their somatic features; a unique…
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The trouble with digitizing archives
There are several methods to organize documents. One of them asks what a document means; whether it is true, authentic or forged; whether it can be understood as a trace of an event that can be used for its reconstruction. Another method does not seek to interpret the document, but to arrange, organize, and add…
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Professor Salamanca and the prospect of American Studies in the Philippines
One of the articles I unearthed while researching for my literature review last semester was Professor Bonifacio Salamanca’s article on the attempt to institute a Department of American Studies at the University of the Philippines. Salamanca received his Ph.D. in American Studies in the early 1950s from Yale University where he was a scholar of…
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Keywords: Visual and Archive
In her book “Artful Science,” Barbara Maria Stafford, Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, examines entertainment and educational materials to see how the visual component changed in the “long eighteenth century,” which she defines as the era of the Baroque to the Romantic period. In relation to the current state of the…
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Geronimo Cristobal 