My Own Words: Slow Time at the Museum
New exhibition format and public programmes at The Vargas Museum
By Tessa Maria Guazon
This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.
'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
The Vargas Museum is located inside the University of the Philippines Diliman campus in Quezon City. Image courtesy of the Vargas Museum.
I have been affiliated with the University of the Philippines Jorge Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center (hereafter, the Vargas Museum) on interim hold-overs in the past. While this attachment has allowed me to become familiar with the museum collections and its programmes, my recent appointment as curator and head of the Vargas Museum opened up space for a new exhibition format and for innovations in the structure of our public programmes. Our recently launched projects ‘Vargas After-Hours’, ‘Raket sa Vargas’, ‘Gardens and Homesteads’, and our current exhibition ‘Fever Dream’ are examples of these changes. ‘Vargas After-Hours’ are evening events with music, video, and performances, while ‘Raket sa Vargas’ is a weekend bazaar to explore alternative economies for artists and creatives. ‘Gardens and Homesteads’ considers sharing, gathering and the making of communal spaces through gardening. While these initiatives are linked to each other, I will use ‘Fever Dream’as an illustration in this article.
Monochrome band playing their set for the inaugural Vargas After-Hours, October 2023. Photo by the author.
The Vargas Museum opened to the public in 1987, but its holdings were turned over to the University of the Philippines a decade before. Distinguished alumnus Jorge Vargas donated his art collection, library and archives, memorabilia, coins, and stamps to the State University. In addition to being a civic leader and patron of the arts, he was executive secretary to the Commonwealth government's President Manuel L. Quezon, and was mayor of Manila during the Japanese Occupation. Vargas’ collection was previously housed at the family's homestead in suburban Mandaluyong, a city in greater Metro Manila. Our museum building, designed by Honorato Paloma and made of concrete, metal, and glass, melds harmoniously with surrounding greenery. My daily visits to the museum remind me of the quiet and tempered elegance of the structure that houses our collection, with its sawtooth awnings, its irregular hexagon floor patterns in pebble wash and concrete, the blue ceramic tiles of our first-floor and second-floor landings, and our wood handrails with newel posts by National Artist Napoleon Abueva.
The building receives warm tropical light in the late afternoon, which is simultaneously an asset and a limitation, as my recent attempts at presenting video works at our lobby would show. My curatorial projects, both in the Philippines and overseas, all emphasise working with often immovable and unchangeable attributes and making the most of them. For architectural space, these might be walls that cannot be moved or taken down, natural light that cannot be brightened or dimmed, and floors and ceilings which are not easily renovated or changed. I use the museum's architecture as a springboard to underline institutional facets and parameters that are not easily dismantled or revised. At the Vargas Museum, as it is often the case at art institutions with minimal budgets and an equally lean work staff, we work with our resources using approaches and strategies that can be described as incremental and slow.
Museum visitors at the second floor permanent exhibition. Image courtesy of the Vargas Museum.
Guided tours for students at the permanent exhibition. Image courtesy of the Vargas Museum.
The Vargas Museum has a robust exhibition programme. On the first floor, we have changing contemporary art exhibitions, while the second floor gallery hosts a permanent exhibition of art and objects from our collection alongside contemporary artworks on long-term loan. The Vargas memorabilia exhibition, and the long-running exhibition of art and objects from the Presidential Commission on Good Government is at our third-floor spaces. Visits, guided tours, and walk-throughs are staple activities for these exhibitions, alongside talks by artists and curators and a study guide that can be used for courses in the arts and allied disciplines.
We implemented a few changes to this structure last year: a longer duration for our changing contemporary art shows, from the previous four weeks to our current run of seven to 12 weeks; rescheduling all guided tours to be on Thursdays to Saturdays instead of all working days; revamping our social media presence; and most significant of all, a new format for our public programmes. We are also redesigning our permanent and long-term exhibitions, making them more visually tactile and engaging. These changes are implemented in stages because of our limited resources—this slowness is coupled with an accompanying smallness. While these revisions are protracted, they cohere into a more encompassing goal of opening the museum to wider viewership and participation, with the latter imagined to be as varied and abundant as possible.
Costantino Zicarelli, ‘Dust of Men’ series, 2023, graphite on paper, exhibition view of ‘Fever Dream’ at the museum’s West Wing Gallery. Image courtesy of the Vargas Museum.
Landscape paintings from the Vargas Museum collection, with excerpts from Jose Rizal’s ‘The Indolence of the Filipinos, and Troy Ignacio’s watercolour on paper paintings ‘Buff/Nerf 01’ (2010) and ‘Meta’ (2019) at the museum’s West Wing gallery. Image courtesy of the Vargas Museum.
Our current contemporary art exhibition, ‘Fever Dream’ illustrates our year-long experiment with slow time. The exhibition previews the long-term collaborative project with curators and spaces in the Philippines, Panama, Taiwan, and South Korea. The project's conceptual grounding is the metaphorical state of fever that is also paradoxical; a harbinger of an uncertain future that is experienced corporeally. Still, it can also convey promise, as is the case of a feverish high or a state of delirium. We employed fever's gradational nature as an exhibitionary sensibility.
Works of participating artists were introduced in three segments. There were monochrome photographs by Veejay Villafranca and a video piece of archival images of the sun from the Manila Observatory by Derek Tumala, vinyl sticker diagrams by Buen Calubayan, and two video works by Jaekyung Jung—one about a plague and the difficult matter of survival, and another about abandoned dogs in a neighbourhood overtaken by development. We titled this first segment ‘Slow Burn’. Cos Zicarelli's graphite drawings, Mark Salvatus's redacted city maps, watercolour paintings by Troy Ignacio, a sound piece by Corinne de San Jose, and Posak Jodian's video work about a lost river were presented in the second segment we called ‘Dog Day Afternoon’. We will screen a film by Ana Elena Tejera and showcase the abstract sculptures of architect Micaela Benedicto for the final segment of the exhibition. I also imagined an “image against image” format as a curatorial strategy for the exhibition—with sections of the works enlarged and printed as a manner of iteration employing visual tactility to create an immersive pull.
Museum visitors gathered inside the circle of speakers for Corinne de San Jose’s sound piece ‘Noiseherding’ (2023) at the museum’s West Wing gallery. Image courtesy of the Vargas Museum.
Preparations for the exhibition emerged from numerous conversations with Juan Canela and Jennifer Choy of Museo de Arte de Contemporañeo (MAC) in Panama, Taipei-based curator Nobuo Takamori, and Korean artist Jaekyung Jung, who is also director of Shhh Project in Incheon. Equally significant, if not more important, are the countless conversations with artists about their current projects and interests as well as the possibilities of expanding them without a fixed deadline in mind. Our goals are for the project to evolve, for it to be alive and continue to be lively. We have anchored our viewership on these walkthrough events, with sporadic posts about the project and our programmes on our social media platforms. We do not yet know if this exhibitionary experiment is successful or not, but we have random photographs of viewers sitting through the entire length of the video works to watch in earnest, standing and even lying inside the circle of speakers, speculating on the location of the maps and the photographs, positioning themselves inside the magnified vortex of a drawing, taking pictures of their shadows against a projected orb that is the sun, and most gratifyingly, reading our bilingual text in English and Filipino, another change I introduced. If exhibitions are to foster the kind of deep attention that is in dearth in our contemporary world, then experiments in slowness may be worth our while.
This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.
About the Writer
Tessa Maria Guazon is principal researcher (Manila) for the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network project. Her recent curatorial projects include 'Panit Bukog 4 - Contemporary Art from Mindanao' the 2021 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan, the traveling exhibition 'Notes for Tomorrow' organised by ICI New York and the Philippine Pavilion for the 58th Venice Art Biennale. Her essays and reviews have been published in anthologies, academic journals, and exhibition catalogs.
