“Gus” Albor
Three more Filipino artists are participating at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Augusto “Gus” Albor, Norberto Carating and Josephine “Jing” Turalba are part of “Personal Structures—Crossing Borders,” an exhibition hosted by the European Cultural Center (ECC).
ECC is the same group organizing the national pavilions of the Philippines (where José Tence Ruiz and Manny Montelibano are exhibiting), the Seychelles and Mongolia.
The first time the Philippines participated in this highly prestigious art exhibition—often called the Olympics of the contemporary art world—was in 1964 with abstract painter José Joya and sculptor Napoleon Abueva as featured artists.
All five artists—Albor, Carating, Turalba, Ruiz and Montelibano—are representing the Philippines. Ruiz and Montelibano are being funded by the government through the National Commission for Culture and the Arts while the rest are privately funded.
“Personal Structures—Crossing Borders” will be held at Palazzo Bembo and Palazzo Mora, May 9-Nov. 22.
“The artists, although mainly from Europe, come from many different parts of the world and are expressing themselves in various ways,” explains the ECC website. “Visually, the artworks may appear very different. Their common ground is the artist’s subjective, personal expression of his or her reflection on the concepts time, space and existence.”
“Personal Structures—Crossing Borders” features European artists in dialogue with non-European artists coming from China, Japan and the Philippines, among others. The exhibit is being facilitated by the GlobalArtAffairs Foundation, with Dutch artist Rene Rietmeyer as curator.
The Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 in New York. Since 2009, it has been based in Leiden, Netherlands, with a branch in Venice, Italy. It aims to heighten the awareness about the more philosophical themes and make these concepts more accessible to a wider international audience.
Albor and Carating are two of the leading abstractionists in mainstream Philippine art. Turralba is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice incorporates intersecting layers of performance, sculpture, video, sound, photography.
For the Venice exhibit, the three artists are revisiting their own personal structures in making art with the intention of breaking new grounds in terms of theory and practice, even questioning formal exhibition systems that have so far attended their works.
The two-man exhibit of Albor and Carating at Room 5 of Palazzo Mora is curated by Rubén D.F. Defeo of the College of Fine Arts of University of the Philippines. Turalba occupies Space C of the Palazzo.
The Palazzo Mora exhibit is part of the European Pavilion in the context of the 2015 Venice Biennale.