2013 / Installation / Artist: Maria Cruz

Cruz’s full-scale construction of a makeshift neighbourhood sari-sari (variety) store showed alongside the work of 23 other artists making up the loose assembly The Bastards of Misrepresentation at their exhibition Manila Vice, Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sete, France, Apr-Sep 2013. This show concurrently ran with the major exhibition of anthropological artifacts in Philippines, Archipelago of Exchange at Musée du quai Branly, Paris, Apr-Jul 2013. The simultaneity of these stagings is pertinent in that the two exhibitions present expectedly incompatible narratives of contemporary urbanity and precolonial sophistication.

As in previous Bastards exhibits, Manila Vice collectively creates a variably dystopic, parodic, and provocative sensory experience of paintings, sound work, and installations by Cruz and Gerry Tan, Poklong Anading, Romeo Lee, Gaston Damag, Valeria Cavestany, Carlo Ricafort, Arvin Flores, Bea Camacho, Kawayan de Guia, Dexter Fernandez, Mm Yu, Lena Cobangbang, Maria Jeona Zoleta, Pow Martinez, Robert Langenegger, and David Griggs, among others. In regard to her work You Lived in My House, Cruz intimates how it was informed by the “double-edged nostalgia” and riffing off from everyday objects associated with the émigré couple Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. The work is an uncharacteristically narrative piece as Cruz supplies it with the lengthy full title You Lived in My House, Ate All My Food, Then You Left Me without a Trace, Leaving Me Titanic VHS, a Kenny G and UB40 CD? Thanks Very Much! In this installation, she invokes her continuing preoccupation with the history and process of painting particularly in regard to Constructivism and hard-edge abstraction as these are transposed unto patched-up walls and hurriedly painted over street rubble landscaped around a rickety structure accessorized in Philippine kitsch. Cruz literally plumbs through these diverse sources and overlays them to evoke an aesthetic sensibility found among organically built structures built within urban informal settlements. You Lived in My House could be taken as illustrative of the amalgam of work that has populated the series of Bastards of Misrepresentation projects shown across America and Europe as they overtly seek to destabilize categories such as identity and culture. These projects are also framed within a visual and verbal rhetoric given to puns and undisguised self-celebratory phrases that not so accidentally resonate in texts on the parallel Paris exhibition. Taken together, the combined texts and works demonstrate artist-curator Manuel Ocampo’s own curatorial logic of putting together “gritty, dirty, edgy, perverted, superficial, double standard, sarcastic, trivial, base, unstable, discordant, tasteless and baroque” work meant to challenge the premises behind what constitutes the improper and artistic in relation to presentation and representation.