ARTFORUM | Nice Buenaventura, Fyerool Darma

In the exhibition “and land erodes into”—the first of curator Carlos Quijon, Jr’s series “Archipelagic Futurisms”—artists Nice Buenaventura and Fyerool Darma respond to the scattered geography of Southeast Asia, a condition that nevertheless engenders a circulation of materials, languages, and knowledge. For Screenshot 11-03-2023 at 03:03 PM (philhuat 2GO) (all works cited, 2023), Darma collected vinyl strips bearing wall texts from previous exhibitions and wove these information-packed strands into striated collages that suggest sinuous oceanscapes. In UTC/Heaven is in Cloud System, Darma experiments with other kinds of collectivization by blending sound samples from varying genres of dance-floor music (Mandarin manyao, Indonesian club dugem, Bisayas EDM budots, etc.). The resulting mash-up showcases the region’s interconnected histories through the breadth of its beats.   

 

On the second floor, Buenaventura’s visual essay on archipelagic thinking focuses on photocopying as a medium of knowledge circulation. In Gaian Assembly XVI, the dark-navy atolls and white volcanic islands on beige canvas conjurevisions of inkblots or torn photocopies. This “Xerox aesthetic” permeates Notes, a mixed-media assemblage of photocopied images and warped texts that has been coupled with Rocks scattered by the last breaths of the Pacific, a single-channel video of languidly revolving windows inscribed with similar-sounding words for “rock”—batu in Bahasa, bato in Tagalog, patu in Proto-Oceanic—in a subtle nod to the lexical inflections that enrich and correlate with the languages of Southeast Asia.