The exhibition, “Cue from Life Itself: Filipino Artists Transform the Everyday”, features works by artists Brenda Fajardo, Poklong Anading, Kristoffer Ardeña, Yason Banal, Alma Quino, Jose Terence Ruiz, Lirio Salvador, and Mark Salvatus.

Poklong Anading collected the seeming detritus of his urban neighborhood, making use of rubble from sewage and road works as well as recovered rags made of waste fabric from textile industries.

Curated by art historian and scholar Patrick D. Flores, the title is lifted from a monograph by artist, educator, and cultural advocate Brenda Fajardo. In the monograph, originally written for the Philippine Educational Theater Association in the early ’80s, Fajardo speaks of how the “attrition of material” indexes an aesthetic and a lifeworld.

Overlapping videos, archival photographs, and other various objects make up the installation, “With Pleasure/ No Tears (A Knife and a Slice of Plutocratic Life)” by Yason Banal

“The ‘ethical’ is central in this discourse,” according to the exhibition text, “As Fajardo asks: ‘How can an artist claim to be socially responsible when he mounts high-cost productions during times of deprivation?’ Her idea of the aesthetics of poverty begins with the artist’s responsiveness to an encompassing but transformable world.

“This exhibition materializes the intuition and the insight honed in the critical awareness of poverty, its deep structure and the chance of its transfiguration in a range of efforts and inspirations, all prompted by the hope that to make do and dream up is to transform the everyday.”

“C_rafts” was first presented in 2011, and is based on Mark Salvatus’ encounters and experiences of Manila floods in 2009 when typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana) ravaged Metro Manila.

Lirio Salvador appropriates everyday and industrial materials such as bicycle gears, stainless steel pipes, bowls, and utensils to create experimental instruments known as “Sandata” (weapon).

The exhibition is mounted with the support of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Office of Congresswoman and Deputy Speaker Loren Legarda.

The exhibition is on view at Galeriya Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila from February 7 to May 7. The museum is open from Mondays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free on Tuesdays.

With a report by JED GREGORIO