David Medalla
dal 19/8/2015 al 19/8/2015
Segnalato da
19/8/2015
David Medalla
Palazzo Mora, Venezia
Performance based on "telekinethetic dreams"
To further inflect the argument of the Pavilion on the saga of empires and the resistance against them, the artist and worldmaker David Medalla will perform at the Philippine Pavilion. Medalla was a seminal contemporary artist in the Philippines, initiating a significant break from Western modernism and internationalism in Manila in the '50s. He organized poetry readings and performances and held his first exhibition of visual art at the artist-initiated space La Cave D'Angely in 1957. Medalla's performance at the Philippine Pavilion is based on "telekinethetic dreams." He revisits his previous sorties in Venice: In 1964, for instance, his sand sculpture was set up at the Villa Foscari in a nocturnal exhibition. Figuring in one of these dreams is the intriguing legend of the pirate Li Ma Hong, "who fled China at the end of the Ming Dynasty and came to the Philippines." In Medalla's words, Li Ma Hong was a kind of "hero (or more accurately an anti-hero)" of his boyhood. Titled Pangarap sa Panglao (Dream in Panglao), the performance likewise alludes to the T'ang Dynasty artist Wu Tao-tzu, the 20th-century writer Lu Hsun, and the explorer-scholar Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza, whose chronicle of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan inspired the idea of space-time relativity. With the performance of David Medalla, in collaboration with Adam Nankervis, and a conversation with the curator Patrick Flores, the Philippine Pavilion speculates on the political future of artistic and political life in the world through the history of the sea and the flaneuries that map archipelagoes. With collateral events at the Sala dei Giardini (August 18, 2015) and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (August 22, 2015).