Curator Essay

Errant Life, Errant Life, Promiscuous Form imagines Promiscuous Form the exhibition as a site of elaborations of Carlos Quijon, Jr vitality—whether involving artistic agencies and forms, practices, and even vis-à-vis art’s vaster ecology and economies of collaboration. Co-organised by Gravity Art Space, a newly inaugurated gallery in Manila, and A+ Works of Art, a young gallery based in Kuala Lumpur, the exhibition presents the works of artists based in Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok whose practices speak to different forms of life. The concept riffs off Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulation “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” From interspecies thinking and formmaking in the works of Tan Zi Hao and Isola Tong, to the life of materials in the context of creative processes in the practice of Pam Quinto and Gary-Ross Pastrana, the attentiveness to how forms of life are informed by particular materialities in the works of Samak Kosem and Yim Yen Sum, how life mediates forms and forms mediate life in Jao San Pedro and Mark Salvatus in collaboration with Seekersinternational, the exhibition explores how forms shape and structure lives and how life informs and structures what forms may be imagined or made material. Ideas of form and life are intertwined and made to mutually constitute each other. In thinking alongside Wittgenstein’s elucidation of forms of life, the exhibition prospects artistic practice as a language that articulates and annotates the interfacing of conceptualizations of life and form. This interfacing reconsiders both notions. By thinking about life in relation to form, we address what materialities life takes and what modes of making it undertakes and undergoes. By looking at form in relation to life, we take note of how form circulates, the kinds of socialities and technologies through which it navigates. The exhibition therefore takes interest in how conceptualizations

of life may be rendered plural, not only in relation to organic and biological perspectives but also in terms of the more hospitable idiom of vitality—the implication and embeddedness in social and technological contexts, itineraries of circulation, translations and iterations in human or nonhuman contexts. In reframing ideas of life this way, it is rendered prolific across intersections of agency and intervention. The exhibition proposes to think about life and form as errant and thus promiscuous. Errancy in this framework alludes to how both life and form thrive in mobility and dissemination and how throughout their circulation they are rendered susceptible to serendipity and contingency. Away from imaginations of autonomy, the works presented in this exhibition are shaped by their participation in the processes of social life of artistic practice and artistic work. Both life and form are rendered promiscuous in the way they are allowed to mingle with each other and among others. Pastrana’s works for the exhibition have been presented elsewhere. In the case of Paperweight (2017), each iteration adds a literal layer to the work in the form of printed materials. Tong’s ghillie suit for Florophilia (2021) has been part of her other works and while is here now displayed on its own, alludes to an extensive biography of use. Tan’s The Light When Dust Settles (2021) is just one articulation of a more expansive research and artistic project involving the household casebearer. To be errant and promiscuous are the conceptual conceit that this exhibition allows to prosper against the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic, nominating the exhibition space as an exceptional milieu where these can be cultivated in diverse and discrepant ways. The work of Tan Zi Hao and Isola Tong look at lifeforms and their participation in economies of anthropocentric meaning-making and urban space. In Tan’s The Light When Dust Settles (2021), he considers the household casebearer, the larva stage of a moth species. The work is composed of two objects: an actual specimen of the larva which has been dusted with gold powder and a magnified image of the casebearer taken with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) in which we see in

microscopic detail a case or carapace of dust. For Tan, the case “epitomise[s] the contingency of dust in mediating form and life.” The larva accumulates dust and other detritus and fashions out of these its domicile. In this sense, dust traces the insect’s itinerary, embodies the history of its life. In the installation, scale informs how we relate to and imagine the life of the larva. The microscopic gesture allows the intimacy of the miniscule specimen and the immensity of the magnified image to mesh in one object. Gold dust adds to value to the specimen inasmuch as the magnification allows us to appreciate the species’s constitution to the most minute detail. As the artist elaborates: “The nondescript appearance of dust betokens a theory of everything under the influence of time. Ever errant and promiscuous, dust tickles our anthropocentric insistence on distinguishing treasure from thrash, life from death, form from formlessness. Juxtaposing a speck of dust and a static panel of light, The Light When Dust Settles is a vision of a portal between worlds: a world where dust gathers and accumulates, vis-à-vis a world that requires no dusting, static and digital.” Tong embodies the forest in Florophilia (2021), an iteration of the artist’s more expansive research project on the Arroceros Forest Part, a pocket of forest at the heart of urban Manila. A ghillie suit on a mannequin stands in one corner of the gallery with leaves and pods of the Fire Tree by its feet. The tree species was brought from Madagascar to the archipelago during the Spanish colonial period, from 16th and 17th century. The artist has used the suit in her research trips to Arroceros, from which it has gathered the assortment of plant matter that accompanies the installation. For Tong, the suit is the skin through which she mediates “the sensuous morphologies of the forest as a phenomenological skinship between human and nonhuman agencies.” For her the suit is emblematic of “haptic ecological lovemaking as one of the highest forms of environmental love, an interpenetration of forms of senses as a form of queer communion.”

Gary-Ross Pastrana and Pam Quinto prospect life in the processes of transforming materials into artworks. Pastrana’s works for the exhibition were both shown in Jakarta in 2017. For Fellen (2017), he crafted a flower out of human skin that he harvested from a friend who has a condition that causes an overproduction of dry skin. To simulate the semblance, Pastrana asked a professional makeup artist to touch up the specimen and to adorn it to her liking. The result is a fragile thing made of paper-thin skin. For Paperweight (2017), he created a starfish from soil, water, and his own blood. The titular paperweight is used to secure a pile of printouts. The printed material is the result of a simple google search using the raw materials of the starfish as key terms: soil, blood, water, star, fish. He asks each gallery that presents it to add to the printouts and with each presentation of the work, the pile grows. Pastrana’s works not only foreground the artistic practice that creates out of various materials and processes an artistic object but also how the exhibitionary becomes a context and condition of generative recontextualizations. The delicate constitution of Fellen anticipates careful handling and touching up. The exhibition in this case becomes an event of interrogating its condition, with each context of display also becoming a context of repair or restoration. While this also applies to the starfish in Paperweight, the interrogation of the exhibition as part of the object’s social life is extended in the latter to its very materiality in the sense that with each exhibition that the work participates in the research accumulates and the printout piles on. Both works speak to the poetic transformation of material into thing. The labor involved seeks semblance and interrogates this aspiration. An astute sensitivity to materiality and the transformative agency of artistic practice to give form to raw material and even to reify it motivates this idiom. These objects are not so much complete and fool-proof mimetic instances but instead are explorations of how artistic labor may constitute its own materiality.

Pam Quinto’s interdisciplinary practice elaborates on these contexts even further. Attuned to how processes and labors shape artistic practice, Quinto has created different suite of works from the same raw materials. Both Longing Vessel (2021) and So-called Biological Clock (2021) involve a ceramic fossil of an undergarment and a ground of living moss attached to it. The former work is the actual object while the latter is an image of Quinto’s first attempt which was abandoned because mold started growing on the moss. Central in the process is the “death” of the actual object as in the creation of the ceramic piece the actual undergarment was incinerated in the firing process, and the “life” of the work as “a living sculpture that would need tending to.” For the artist: “The stewardship of the piece becomes akin to the care of the self and the care of another.” Transference (2021) and Our bodies will have kept score (2021) are works that involve pieces of wood which are painted and then subjected to the repetitive process of gluing together and ripping apart. The process has left indelible marks on the surface of the pieces. Transference is composed of a video of this process and a sculpture created from the wood pieces, and Our bodies will have kept score is a close-up print of the wood’s texture. In Quinto’s work, process is practice. Each aspect of process yields to a materiality and each materiality its own economy of signification: from the pressures of womanhood to the transformative effects of intimacy. The attentiveness to the materialities that shape forms of life motivates the works of Samak Kosem and Yin Sum Yen. Inspired by the Islamic imaginations of the afterlife where objects return as sentient, able to testify for one’s sin or sanctity, Kosem’s brotherhood (2021) look at the interfacing of material, faith, and queerness. The work is composed of sarongs that he has collected from young queer men from Islamic schools in southern Thailand. The artist placed the sarongs side by side

and inscribed on them prayers and confessions of his own queerness. Alongside this work is the video work titled habibi (2021) where he juxtaposes an archival footage of the Bacha Bazi (“dancing boys”), an entertainment culture prevalent in South Asia wherein an all-male audience watch a program of all-male dancers, and the performance of queer Muslim dancer Manawat Promrat in the privacy of their own room. In the duration of the video, the queer body and its performance displaces the archival record of the Bacha Bazi performance. What results is a montage that makes it seem that the gathering of men is watching the exuberant performance of Manawat. For the artist, “This video work reflects the contradictions of the male gaze vis-a-vis the imagined male effeminacy and form of desire in religious subjectivities. This performance of ‘Bacha Bazi’ by Manawat Promrat, a queer Muslim both explores and exposes their body as material culture.” In both works, homosociality assumes the materiality of textile and also the filmic montage and the embodied performance. Queerness manifests in the intimate juxtapositions of maleness and masculinity as performance, in the contexts of homosocial gathering and performance, and in the effeminate body as it absorbs the masculine gaze and thrives in it. Yin Sum Yen, meanwhile, looks at the history of heritage sites vis-à-vis urban landscapes. Using dyed gauze panels, both Floating Island (2020) and the series Keep a distance (2021) interrogate notions of scale and the built environment. She takes notice of how while actual heritage buildings are protected from gentrification, its perimeters do not usually share this protection. With aggressive development in the areas surrounding these heritage sites, the actual buildings that are supposed to protected are dwarfed or rendered miniscule or alien. In Floating Island, the structure maintains its scale and the golden façade retains its allure, but it is by its lonesome, abstracted from its environmental context. In Keep a distance, while each of the structures fashioned out of sheer textile is of equal length (measured per panel of gauze), their placement

in acrylic boxes make it appear that each structure is in different stages of sinking. For the artist, the works presented in the exhibition “focus on the contradiction, awkwardness, and the strangeness of the situation that these old buildings are embedded in by playing with the size and scale of these installations.”

Finally, the work of Jao San Pedro and the collaborative production of Mark Salvatus and Seekersinternational play out the mutual constitution of forms and lives. Continuing her explorations on the grid as the normative trope of both modernist art history and heterosexist imaginations of identity and expression, San Pedro creates an item of clothing that embraces and exceeds the limiting imaginations of grid as form through her own trans body. Starting from a piece of square fabric, San Pedro fashions a garment that takes shape according to the body that wears it, according to the performance of wearing the fabric, the cloth draping onto body, or the garment slipping into a shape. According to her: “the trans body presents itself as a mode and framework of abstraction that seizes and rules its configurations. The structure’s failure, fracture, and reliance on the trans body inspect a paradoxical potentiality where wholeness can refuse dogma and fixity.” Stitching together existing video clips of his artistic trips, Salvatus offers us a glimpse of his life before the global pandemic. From videos of landscape, performances, and more diurnal and transitory footages, the resulting montage materializes memory and presence. Through the sound design

of Seekersinternational, a DJ collective with roots from the Philippines and based in Canada, the archival materials but are now given a new sense of contemporaneity, unfolding as a visual and sonic experience in the gallery. In this sense the specter of the archive haunts the present and the contemporary and it is the ever-present unfolding of these experiences in the context of the exhibition that refuses the foreclosing of memory and transforms it into a sense of futurity against the monotony of our domestic worlds in the time of a global pandemic.

The exhibition affords the works a space to converse with and to inflect one another’s concerns and interests. While this is an aspect of the exhibitionary form that inheres in its very materiality of gathering discrepant forms, people, and discourses in a bounded space, Errant Life, Promiscuous Form highlights this even more. The works in the exhibition play out continuously proliferating networks, sites, and contexts of practice, forms, lives—ever errant and persistently promiscuous.