LANI MAESTRO AND MANUEL OCAMPO TO REPRESENT THE PHILIPPINES AT 2017 VENICE BIENNALE

The Philippines’s National Commission for Culture and the Arts has announced that artists Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo will represent the Republic of the Philippines at the Fifty-Seventh Venice Biennale, which will be held from May 13 to November 26, 2017. Joselina Cruz, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila, will curate the pavilion.

Titled “The Spectre of Comparison,” the winning proposal will explore Filipino political leader and nineteenth-century author José Rizal’s notion of cross-cultural comparisons. “The exhibition looks at both artists as emblematic of the experience of Rizal’s devil of comparisons,” Cruz said. “The exhibition proposes a reading of both the Philippines and the West through their works.” The devil of comparisons is a reference to Rizal’s seminal novel Noli Me Tangere (1887), in which the protagonist returns to Manila from Madrid with a changed perspective on his home after experiencing modernized European cities.

The jury consisted of Eugene Tan, director of the National Gallery Singapore; Florentina P. Colayco, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila; artist Luis E. Yee Jr.; Felipe de Leon Jr., NCCA chairperson and Philippine pavilion commissioner; and Senator Loren Legarda.