"UTOPIAN U-TURNS: Fashioning Reversals"

UTOPIAN U-TURNS exhibits nerve, bravado, pluck. It is a young take on fashion—by a group of designers who, having grown up in the Philippines, have experienced intimacies with dystopia. That they can turn to clothes-, jewelry- and shoe-making with unusual savior-faire, may be precisely because their utopias are personal and ever-provisional. They came out of curated preparation for IFS London 2016—a guided foray into the nasty underbellies of mining, settler frontiers, cultural politics—with ideas about contriving empty bullet shells into structural facets of clothes, skin and latex refiguring of shoes inspired by surgery, and ennobling folksy bast fiber by unusual manipulation. Their ideas are materialized in this exhibit.

Jared Servano, Maco Custodio, Micki Olaguer, and Thian Rodriguez took up the curators’ challenge for them to face up to the nervous ricocheting of dystopia/utopia in Philippine life by taking up materials with profound histories, fashioning these into wearables of strange elegance, and resisting superficial discourses of recycling. They took up the challenge with deep hesitation, but ultimately with remarkable inventiveness. And it is clear that they are able to do so because of mastery of craft. They know their metals, their leather, their indigenous fiber, their latex, their mother-of-pearl. It is very much the case that utopian longing is possible to articulate in expert making.

The grid and the cube —the forms most expressive of modern utopian longing -- provides the exhibition design structure for Utopian U-turns. But in this exhibition, the grid and the cube are interrupted by unruly lines, as indeed, Rationalist order is refigured organically in the Philippines with strangely positive, however dystopic effects. The interrupted grid is hence the context for the young fashion designers of a country where creativity is cultivated as the political, social, historical, economic, environmental orders are shifted by change, always very quickly.

The Philippine exhibition in IFS 2016 required in-depth conceptualization, systematized designer selection, curatorial training, and narrativization of the collections. The Philippine delegation is particularly proud of the two brilliant minds that had made possible this fusion of rigorous intellectual work and design— Marian Pastor Roces and Judy Freya Sibayan.

Marian Pastor Roces

Marian Pastor Roces enjoys recognition and respect in the international contemporary art, museology, and Cultural Theory communities. In 1997, she founded TAO MANAGEMENT CORPORATION —to be known by its brand name TAO INC— an agency specializing in museum and exhibition development, to help give momentum to the shift of curatorship from a 19th century practice of custodianship, to the current craft informed by critical theory. She worked as critical commentator on international art, culture, and politics supported by prestigious institutions worldwide. Her lectures and analysis have also been published in different countries worldwide. With her curatorial leadership, Pastor Roces orchestrated the disparate elements of the Philippine exhibition into a harmonious whole.

Judy Sibayan

Artist, writer, professor, and adjunct curator of TAO INC., Sibayan, provided the overall creative direction for the Philippine exhibition. Backed by her staunch creative vision, experience, research, and pedagogy, Sibayan mentored the designers and nurtured in them the emancipatory will to create and understand acts of the imagination. She conceptualized, developed, refined, and realized the curatorial plan to its full execution. A pioneering conceptual and performance artist, Sibayan is a veteran figure in Philippine contemporary art and curatorship and has performed and exhibited her work in venues worldwide. She is the publisher of the internationally respected e-journal of contemporary art Ctrl+P and has designed academic programs for Industrial Design and Arts Management.

For more information on the curators, please download their portfolio here.