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The Multiple eXposure Project

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The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer. As what the name of the project implies, this endeavor is profoundly interested in the notions of the “multiple” and the “exposure” both in their literal and symbolic sense.

Firstly, The Multiple eXposure Project seeks to examine the multiple potentials of image-making or photography (digital and analogue; still and moving) as a medium, a performance, and an instrument of social engagement and (ex)change, and the overlapping of it with other disciplines. As part of its exploration, this project involves a series of visual, photographic or lens-based workshops in collaboration with non-profit, grassroots volunteer groups. The concept of the multiple is also applied under the framework of collaborative work – of bring together multiple individuals with multiple philosophies into a plurality of shared experiences.

Secondly, The Multiple eXposure Project is equally drawn to the idea of “exposure” (subjection, experience, vulnerability, coverage, documentation, and so on) in the process of socially-engaged image-making that exposes what needs to be exposed; clarifies the obscure; and concerns itself with a gamut of critical questions and discursive issues of representation.

Through image-making, we aim to expose and get exposed.

Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube (December 1-31, 2015)

Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube
Organized by The Multiple eXposure Project
www.themultipleexposureproject.co.nr
Location: Public Spaces, Metro Manila, Philippines
Date: December 1-31, 2015

December 1-2 (8pm-10pm): EDSA Avenue cor. Kamuning Rd. Quezon City
December 5 (7pm-9pm): Ayala-Paseo Pedestrian Underpass, Makati City
December 13 (6pm-7pm): Alabang-Montillano Footbridge, Muntinlupa

Click here to view the Catalogue: http://bit.ly/1Ob3pC2

Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube is an alternative, traveling, curatorial project that features image-based works across different disciplines and media by emerging artists whose works discuss the notion of the “public” and its complexities.

What is public? What counts as public? The “public” is a multi-layered concept defined differently depending on how the term is used and framed. It is a notion devoid of singularity and is, grammatically speaking, a terrain of contradictions. As a noun and an adjective, the public constitutes the people, masses or community, and suggests anything that is staged, accessed, or seen out in the “open.” The public can also be used as a verb to describe something one does, as in make public or publicize, suggesting the movement or shift from the inside (private) to the outside (public). Paradoxically, however, the same term also points to the limits of such openness and movement. Given that it simultaneously refers to something “involving and provided by the government”, the public is always at risk of becoming merely an apparatus of the sovereign state and its institutions, thus making the flow of its production, distribution, and consumption partial and counterproductive.

Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube seeks to re-frame the practice of curating and spectating images outside the exclusionary, institutional borders of the “white cube” or gallery space. Public spaces are used as an exhibition site to stimulate a mode of spectator experience that revolves around displacement of the passersby (public) from their “habitus” by interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic. We alter a familiar public space and transform it into an unusual, dialogic site for image projection and exhibition, taking advantage of its accessibility and site-specificity in order to redefine the ways the spectators look at and engage with images. Adopting “guerilla urbanism” as a curatorial strategy, we make sense of the immediacy of the “public” and reflect upon its context, meanings, and intersections with representation, place, and discourse. In so doing, we intervene and reformat aspects of the urban landscapes and emphasize the “counter-spectacle” in art viewing and appreciation. This project also underlines the inherent ephemerality of an open-to-the-public display in relation to time and space. As a “traveling” exhibition which heavily depends on projection technology and public space as its “frame” or “canvas", this project celebrates the momentary nature of image-viewing, consumption, and mobility in the metropolis at a time of constant flux and transition.

List of Works and Artists:

Video Arts
Borders - Anne Murray (USA)
The Separation Loop - Leyla Rodriguez (Germany)
Gnomonicity - Amitesh Grover (India)
36&71 - Anthony Stephenson (USA)
Sully - Marbella Carlos (Canada)
You See Davis - Rembrandt Quiballo (Philippines, USA)
Untitled (Sleeping People in a Train) - Hannah Reber (Germany)
Into the labyrinth - Geordy Zodidat Alexis (France)
The Safest of Hands - Clint Sleeper (USA)
Hunt/Find - Dani Salvadori (UK)
Leaving My Skin - Ellen Wetmore (UK)
Presence of Absence - Matt Lee (India)
Untitled – Mohammad Namazi (UK, Iran)

Still Images / Photographs
Right Time Right Place - Robert Rutoed (Austria)
Peripheral Strangers - Julie Dawn Dennis (UK)
De Staat (The State) - Maarten Tromp (Netherlands)
Ruinophilia - Anna Garrett (UK)
Circling the Square - Arturo Soto (Mexico)
The Spectator, the Viewer, the Observer and the Perceiver – Francine LeClercq (USA)
Magic Rooms - Carlos Collado (Spain)
Date of Consumption - Lita Poliakova
Street Photography - John Robert Luna (Philippines)
Walls - Elena Efeoglou (Greece)
Fitting Room – Megan Mace (South Africa)
Street art you can take home (for free) - Lorenzo Bordonaro (Portugal)
Victim – Solomon Eko (Nigeria)

Performance Videos / Public Interventions
Balloon Performance - Louise Winter (UK)
Somarts Mural Dance - Johanna Poethig (USA)
Unpatentable Multitouch Aerobics - Liat Berdugo (USA)
Disclaimer at Manchester Art Gallery - Laura Gower (UK)
Sustaintability – Dani Lamorte and Veronica Bleaus (USA)

Animations / Digital
Job Interview - Dénes Ruzsa and Fruzsina Spitzer (Hungary)
In Between - Sofia Makridou, Theodora Prassa (Greece)
Decadence of Nature - Olga Guse (Russia)
AsianGirl N40°42'54.488" W73°59'30.313" - Victoria Elle, Rocky Li, and Jennifer Mehigan (USA)

Get Featured in our Blog!
We are currently expanding the content of our blog and we would like to feature multidisciplinary/multimedia artists, photographers, image-makers, visual artists, performers, and so on, their portfolio, artistic practice, and research interests. The feature section serves as a virtual, archival gallery and a platform for free promotion. This call is open to all artists – individuals or groups; amateur or professional – anywhere in the world.

If you think your works are relevant to The Multiple eXposure Project, send your artist statement, sample of your portfolio, photos, videos, press releases, and other related materials to themultipleexposureproject@gmail.com.

Moving Still: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 2.0

The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.

New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:

Jessica Buie / Liat Berdugo / Laura Hyunjhee Kim / Nicola Hands / Tony Radin Jacobs / (c) merry / Talia Link / Justin Zachary / Adrian Errico / Matteo Pasin / Jean-Michel Rolland / Manasak Khlongchainan / Boris Contarin / Hüseyin Çife / Suman Kabiraj / Patrick Moser / Francesca Fini / Aaron Oldenburg / Benjamin Grosser/ You Qi / Dénes Ruzsa / Fruzsina Spitzer / Fran et Jim / Amelia Johannes / Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn / Jess, Lau Ching Ma / Scott F. Hall / Eleni Manolaraki / Elise Frost Harrison Banfield Jack Rees / Daehwan Cho / Wu Siou Ming / Masako Ono / Bárbara Oettinger

Editor's Note:
By Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo

I n this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.

Selected artists here make use of the “screen” as medium and performance space. By displaying, curating, and performing in front of the screen, self-image-formation is enacted while relying on playful encounter with unknown spectators in order to weave different webs of interpretation. In this regard, the screen operates as an intermediary in the artist’s performance that brings connections to identities, personal narratives, history, everyday politics, and imaginaries.

The symbiotic relationship between the screen and the subject cultivates the construction of an image or spectacle that is consumed – temporally and spatially - in a doubling of intermediation. They deflect and reflect a plethora of shifting, hybrid pretexts about ourselves within the digital ecology where the delineating lines between the public and the private; the human and the mechanical; and the material and the virtual boundaries become blurred.

Given their hyperreal structure, these video performances, visual interventions, and recorded choreographies trigger a mode of mediated encounter that heavily manipulates moments of reality – of space and time. Intimacy and presence are concomitantly altered as these pieces can be incessantly scrutinized by the gaze of many anonymous viewers floating in the digital currents, allowing us to re-locate the individual and re-think about the concept of selfhood more fluidly.

Self-as-Subject: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 1.0

We are pleased to announce that the very first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!

Below is the list of contributors (artists and writers) included in the publication:

J.D. Doria / Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini / Aldobranti / Olga Sidilkovskaya / Ana Rita Matias / Anne Paternotte / Rudi Rapf / Leigh Anthony Dehaney / Laura Knapp / Jennifer van Exel / Derya Edem / Arushee Agrawal / Utami Dewi Godjali / Çağlar Uzun / Mahmoud Khattab / Noel Villa / Dawn Woolley / Teresa Ascencao / Kalliope Amorphous / Katrina Stamatopoulos / Gaspard Noël / Florian Tenk / Petra Brnardic / Sana Ghobbeh / Alonso Tapia-Benitez / Libby Kay Hicks / Agent X / Rina Dweck / Yoko Haraoka / Claire Manning / Pietro Catarinella / Anne Beck / Gabriel Orlowski / Ralph Klewitz / Anthony Hall / Alessandro Martorelli / Robin Gerris / Carol Radsprecher / Veronica Hassell / Daniela Olejnikov / Jayson Carter / Nathaniel St. Amour / Jonathan Armistead / Piotr Boćkowski

Editor's Note:
By Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo

"Who are you?” “Who am I?” “Who do I think I am?” “What am I made of?” There is nothing simple about such inquiries as they pose a number of phenomenological and ontological issues.

To ask yourself or someone about self-definition is to deal with its vicissitudes and fluidities, oscillating between the ego and the alter ego; the naturalistic (Hume) and the metaphysical (Kant); and the reflexive perception of one’s body and the relational introspection with the “Other.” The self is, arguably and fundamentally, a complicated subject matter. It is an ever-evolving object, a corporeal being, an affective body, a precarious entity, a discursive phenomenon, and so forth.

Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.

In Chapter 1, The Self as I/Other, authors reflect on the dialectics between the ego and the alter ego and the multitude of ways the “self-as-subject” is defined by both internal and external contingencies, or philosophically speaking, by the binaries – “I” vs. “not-I.” Many of these selected pieces are visibly entangled with the act of self-mirroring, which is inherently reflective and performative: it involves the constitution of subjectivities based on visual imaginary reflected on the mirror that does not necessarily resemble the complex structures of the material body. What I highlight here is the notion of self-perception (internal) in relation to one’s experiences and the (external) world. As Anthony Giddens puts it, “A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography…cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.” (54).

In Chapter 2, The Fetishized Self, we see interconnected self-representations that examine the convergence of idiosyncratic fantasies with the phantasmagoria as an offshoot of the fetishized commodity. When I refer to the term, phantasmagoria, I emphasize the volatile strings of imaginations through which the public and the private dimension of identity becomes obscured, blurring the demarcating lines between reality and fantasy. This section functions as a provocation of the fetishization of self and the centrality of the individual as authority. Through role-playing, the self, as a fetish object imbued with power and discourse, becomes an agency displaying and interrogating the politics of gender, sexuality, identity, and bodily desire.

Finally, in Chapter 3, The Fragmented Self, the fragmentation of identity framed within the digital, virtual, or hyperreal context is explored. Featured works here represent the various modes the anonymity, simulation, multiplicity, and control in data superhighway allow the transformation of the self into fragmented, hybrid subjects. The concept of “self-fragmentation” also revolves around the nature of post-modernism: the absence of absolute truth and the presence of disembodied self.

Bibliography:
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.

Featured Artists
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Accustomed Othering in Colonial Writing

A Review of “Customs of the Tagalogs” (two relations) by Juan de Plasencia
From The Philippine Islands 1493-1898
Full text accessible via: gutenberg.org

By Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo

There are at least three major discursive issues that can be extracted from the document, Customs of the Tagalogs written by Juan de Plasencia in 1589, if we are to put socio-political context into the text – first, the issue of authorship; second, the discourse of power in colonial writing; and third, the logic of binarism or the Occident-Other dichotomy. These are interrelated threads that probably constitute major segments of colonial historical writing in the Philippines.

The authorial voice or authorship plays a pivotal role in putting meaning(s) to this colonial text. The author, Juan de Plasencia was, in the first place, not a native Tagalog but a Franciscan missionary who first arrived in the Philippines in 1577. He was tasked by the King of Spain to document the customs and traditions of the colonized (“natives”) based on, arguably, his own observations and judgments. Notably, de Plasencia wrote the Doctrina Cristiana, an early book on catechism and is believed to be the first book ever printed in the Philippines. Such initiatives were an accustomed practice of the colonizer during the Age of Discovery to enhance their superiority over the colonized and validity of their so-called duties and legacies to the World. It is a common fact that during this era, the Spanish colonizers, spearheaded by missionaries, drew a wide variety of texts ranging from travel narratives and accounts of the colony to even sermons.

In this particular text, de Plasencia tried to avoid discussing the “conflicting reports of the Indians” through an “informed observation” to obtain the “simple truth.” This “truth,” however, is debatable, and the manner of how he actually arrived to his reports is even more problematic. The text foregrounds two important figures: the observer (de Plasencia) himself, with his own background, subjectivites and biases; and the observer’s subject (Tagalogs), seen as the “Other,” a metonymic amalgam of communal characteristics, local customs and traditions, etc. In colonial situations, the relationship of these figures – the colonizer and the colonized – flows in both but unequal directions; the former being the dominant, while the latter is the inferior one, or as Edward Said put it, “a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony… a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veridic discourse about the Orient” (72). Seen from the center looking toward the culturally and politically inferior periphery, the colonizers find identity in its compelling position as the sophisticated dominating “self” versus the inferior dominated “Other.” The use of politically incorrect terms such as “Indians,” “tribal” and “natives,” and adjectives such as “amusing,” “foolish” and “absurd” in the text is just a manifestation of the conflicting Occident-Other paradigm.

Clearly serving immediate colonial interests, many portions of the narrative are problematic insofar as they posit the Tagalogs in such a way as to enhance the validity of the colonizer’s allegiances. Skewed preconception and descriptive biases thrive throughout the entire document. In de Placensia’s account on land ownership, for example, he said that “the lands were divided among the barangay and…no one belonging to another barangay would cultivate them unless after the purchase or inheritance.” However, “since the advent of the Spaniards, it is not so divided.” Such statement implies that the intervention of the colonizer has put order into the divisiveness. He also made a conclusion that Catholicism was able to expel primitive and evil belief systems of the Tagalogs regarding gods, burials and superstitions, saying that “all the Tagalogs not a trace of this is left; and that those who are now marrying do not even know what it is, thanks to the preaching of the holy gospel, which has banished it.” This claim undermines that the Tagalog population did not fully embrace Catholicism but appropriated it according to their indigenous religious practices. Generalized and essentialist claims were also made by de Placencia in his discussion of the local customs in “Laguna and tingues, and among the entire Tagalo race.” What constituted the Tagalo race in the first place? How did he come up with such a category? The people of Laguna were just a small member of the Tagalogs and referring them as the mirror of the entire Tagalo race is erroneous.

Tagalog royal couple from the Boxer Codex (c. 1595)

A large fraction of his accounts were also based on false comparisons, and not coupled with accurate information. He repetitively compared local traditions with Western paradigm/parameters. The Tagalog idol, lic-ha, for example, was matched up with Romans’ statue of deity of a dead man who was brave in war and endowed with special faculties. These two objects are evidently different in nature and don’t fall under the same category. Datos were also described as the equivalent of the European “nobles,” hence undermining the indigenous political systems. Worse, the ritualistic and superstitious beliefs of the Tagalogs were mocked by de Placencia, by coming up with various categories of devil-ish beliefs. The mangagauay and mangagayoma, for instance, were both regarded as “witches” who performed deceitful healing procedures, a judgment made by an outsider who knew nothing about the complexity of indigenous psyche. What he failed to realize is that in traditional cultures, these so-called “evil” practices were an integral part of Filipino folk beliefs; and the early Tagalogs, in reality, never considered them as acts of the devil. Needless to say, the application of Western parameters to local traditions has often proven fractious especially in classifying and describing local and colonial situations.

Given the plethora of biases and to a great extent, inaccurate judgments and pretensions of the author, the text was clearly not written for local consumption, but for Western readers. Customs of the Tagalogs, just like any other colonial texts written during the Spanish colonial period, was intentionally made to provide an exoticize description of the Tagalog natives, clearly fed by politics and propaganda and operated with the Western-outsider's gaze, that would be appealing to them.

Work Cited:

Said, Edward W. The Edward Said Reader. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.

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