Love is Like a Heat Wave, a major solo exhibition of the late Filipina-American artist Pacita Abad, opened recently at Silverlens Manila and runs until March 16. Love is Like a Heat Wave celebrates the 20th anniversary of Circles in My Mind, Pacita’s landmark exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The exuberant exhibition would serve as the final presentation of the artist’s work, before her passing in 2004.
The works in the show are part of a series of works on paper produced during her residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) in 2003, where she explored her long-standing interest in color and material culture, through the boundless possibilities of papermaking, printmaking, and painting.
Rounding out the exhibition are Pacita’s rarely exhibited floral oil-on-paper monoprints created during her residence in Jakarta in the late 1990s. Layers of delicately applied oil paint transferred onto paper, these compositions possess a tranquil tenderness that juxtaposes the ravenous abundance of most of Pacita’s oeuvre.
Various artists also exhibited at the recent Art Fair Philippines. Nearly 200 works by 62 artists were also on the Silverlens website. Curated by gallery directors Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo, Silverlens’ presentation consisted of five sections: Ends with Nature, Cuts and Tears, Surface, Stories, and History and Identity.
In the ArtfairPH/Projects section, Artes Mundi 10 Winner Taloi Havini also presented Dengung Hyena (Hyena Resounding) (2020), which she created in collaboration with Indonesian-Australian sound designer Michael Toisuta. Dengung Hyena (Hyena Resounding) incorporated Taloi’s footage of the yyena ritual in her native Bougainville, which captured the night-time celebration of mass coral-spawning, alongside Toisuta’s use of Indonesian gamelan instruments. The work suggested that profound historical understanding can be achieved through various kinds of sharing of cultural material, rejecting traditional artistic and cultural hierarchies.
