The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry invites you to a FarBar program with Manila-based curator Patrick Flores and artists Jason Dy and Mark Salvatus as they discuss their roles in Register of Deeds: An Archive of Instincts, a project centered on archiving curatorial and artistic efforts. The project seeks to revisit two exhibitions, Bisa: Potent Presences and Danas (Sensing), and reflect on their propositions, proceeding from the view that curatorial work looks after materials, and as such takes on an ethical nature. When these materials speak to conceptions of sensing and subjectivity, the ethical and the aesthetic tend to touch a delicate point of contact. This encounter becomes more palpable in the context of a global pandemic in which intimacies and urgencies are exceptionally complicated. Thus, instead of the archive constricting into a device of accumulation, it turns into a more fluid opportunity for annotation and reciprocity. It is in this spirit of convergence that the curatorial efforts of Patrick Flores on local affect (Danas) and potency (Bisa) incline towards or open up to the artistic gestures of Rocky Cajigan, Jason Dy, and Mark Salvatus who during the long quarantine period in the Philippines patiently produced work within private spaces and across fully exposed digital platforms. These include Salvatus’s microecology of the home as a site of creative practice in collaboration with his son Yoji; Jason Dy and his flower installations for daily Catholic masses; and Rocky Cajigan and his acrylic paintings of the wet market in pandemic time. These curatorial and artistic instincts shape the basis of a portable archive, which is being designed by Mica Cabildo.

A Zoom link will be posted on the Gray Center's home page near the time of the event.

Closed captioning will be provided.

Image: Mark Salvatus, Home Exhibition For Yoji # 13, 2020

About the Participants:
Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Curator of the Vargas Museum. He was the Artistic Director of the Singapore Biennale in 2019 and the Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Jason Dy, SJ is a Jesuit priest and contemporary artist who is currently lecturing at the Fine Arts Department of the Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City. Like in his art projects Barter (2016) and Procesion de los Camareros (2017-2018), Dy investigates “the community and studio-based responses to changing religious and cultural circumstances, locations and events.” Currently, since the lockdown in March 2020 because of the pandemic, Dy has been arranging flowers as part of the ongoing art project Arrange/Enliven.

Mark Salvatus is from Lucban and Manila, Philippines. He studied Advertising at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and since 2006 has produced his artistic project as Salvage Projects working across various disciplines and media.

About FarBar:
Conceived as a way to maintain the ethos of our regular Sidebar series for the pandemic moment, FarBar is a vehicle for artistic and scholarly dialogue with practitioners from around the world. Throughout 2020-2021, our planned conversations with artists in Puerto Rico, Haiti, South Africa, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, and Chicago will revolve around translation, indigeneity, ecological and economic collapse, logics of extraction, crisis, and memory and the archive. Being online for the year will also enable the Gray Center to reach audiences well beyond our Chicago geography, so please invite your far-flung friends. 

Related To:

• FARBAR