Mabini Projects

/Conversations/Positions/Photoma
April 6 – May 5, 2018

Hannah Aaron
Dada Docot
Gerome Soriano
Joseph Yap
RV Sanchez
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan

OPENING:
Friday, April 6, 2018, 6 pm

EXHIBITION DATA:
6 April to 5 May, 2018

For the second iteration of /Conversations/Position, MABINI Projects invites Photoma (photoma.info). Photoma is a platform investigating the scope of Philippine photography within contemporary art. The primary focus is assessing its development in the field of contemporary art. Photoma serves as a portal for experimentation and critical perspectives in photographic practices. It asks questions like: How is the medium currently defined? What concerns are Filipino artists exploring? Are there practitioners who use alternative image-making equipment? How is photography materialized in terms of visual output? How does photography play out in conceptual and thematic-based practices? And in performance art? What distribution pathways are used? The active archive not only includes practitioners from the Philippines, but it also includes Filipino practitioners living abroad, as well as artists of foreign origin who have been practicing within what is understood as the Filipino experience. Photoma further intends to contribute to critical discussions, foster relationships between creators, share peer initiatives, create awareness, and be a catalyst for future exhibitions, lectures, talks and other modes of information dissemination. Finally, it is a work-in-progress that will adapt to the challenges that its development will bring forth.

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Hannah Aaron (1993) is based in Antipolo, Rizal, Philippines. She nished a degree in Education, majoring in English. And since gradu- ation, she is pursuing a career in photography and she joined a group exhibition in Vetro titled Present Progressive (2016).

“I found refuge in the discovery of the universality of the language of images and how it speaks to everybody – whether or not it speaks the same meanings to each person, it speaks. e freedom that is brought about speaking visual languages almost knows no bound- aries and it brought me to learn analogue photography and later on, experimental darkroom printing techniques.”
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Dada Docot is currently a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and is the first Filipino recipient of the Government of Canada’s Vanier Awards. At the University of British Columbia, she co-founded the UBC Philippine Studies Series. In 2014, she was a visiting scholar at Oxford University’s Centre for Migration, Policy, and Society. Dada obtained her masters degree in Human Security Studies, Department of Anthropology at the University of Tokyo. Her on-going doctoral dissertation is based on her ethnographic fieldwork in her hometown in Bicol, Southern Luzon Island, Philippines. She is a visual anthropologist whose works center on Filipino overseas migration, with works have been shown in both academic and art environments including the Society of Visual Anthropology’s Film Festival, the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila, the CaixaForum in Barcelona, The Red House Center for Culture and Debate in Sofia, Bulgaria, among others.
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RV Sanchez (b. 1992) is an artist based in Cebu City, Philippines. He earned a B.F.A. from the University of San Carlos, in Cebu City. He has experimented with a wide range of media including painting, photography, video installation and performance, addressing various issues in contemporary society. He likes to perform and install videos on spaces that are considered bane for artistic expression.

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art festivals in the Philippines, and held his first solo exhibition at Halad Museum in 2014. His video work ‘Piege’ was included in Pulses and Pauses, an international video art exchange program at Marrakesh, Morocco in 2016. He is one of the founders of Beta Operations, an ongoing collaborative project between artists based in Cebu City that explores new media art.
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Gerome Soriano is a visual artist who lives in Manila, Philippines. He graduated with the Best Thesis award for his Kite Aerial Photography work in the Fine Arts program of the University of Santo Tomas. He also received the Most Appreciated portfolio award from the 2012 Manila Behance portfolio review. 
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Joseph Yap (b. 1993) is a visual artist and industrial designer with a technical background in materials. He plays with materials when exploring aesthetics and function, which often involves deconstructing the world into elemental units and discovering new ways to recreate it. His interest in photography began when studying microstructure for metallurgy. The elemental aspects of a material (or medium) was not only indicative of its properties, but was also extremely beautiful. Photography’s infinite possibilities and close relationship with technology have continued to fascinate him.

His first solo show, “The Animation of the Visible Spectrum” (2017), aimed to expand photography’s notion on how to capture light, transform digital information, and how to manifest physical form. The namesake photo series was inspired by how the visible spectrum was presented in an elementary fine arts book.

Joseph Yap finished his Bachelor’s Degree in Materials Engineering at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and he is currently under the New Design Graduates Training Program (NDGT) of the Design Center of the Philippines. As part of NDGT, he has participated in two group design exhibitions, “edit: Objects Redesigned” (2017), and “RAW: Learning Crafts” (2017). He also participated in “SPAM” group video exhibition as part of “Escape 2016: I Love You Virus.”

Joseph Yap was born in Metro Manila in 1993, where he continues to live and work.
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Sherwin Rivera Tibayan (Subic Bay, Philippines, 1982) is a photographer based in Austin, Texas. His work has been exhibited internationally and recognized by Photolucida, the Magenta Foundation, and the Houston Center for Photography. In 2012 he received the Award for Innovations in Digital Imaging from the Society for Photographic Education for his project, "The Histograms". He has participated in residencies and projects with the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Triple Canopy, and A.C.R.E. In 2018 his work will be profiled in the upcoming survey publication, "Filipino American Artist Directory".