VIVA EXCON Antique 2023- Panultol

08-10 November 2023
Antique Provincial Library & Local Archives, and the Library Annex

Social and economic inequality in Negros Island is deeply rooted in the production of sugar. Urged by this crisis, the members of Black Artists in Asia (BAA)—the founder of the Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon)—banded together to generate, through culture and art, a force for meaningful social transformation. The BAA began their collective activities in 1986, in the midst of the man-made Negros famine wherein tens of thousands of children suffered severe starvation and many eventually lost their young lives. The BAA upheld the belief that arts and culture should reflect people’s lives, and used their art and exhibition platforms as a tool to tell the world about the plight of the sugarcane workers in Negros. Artists from across the sea, including Japanese artists, shared such a vision and their solidarity helped spread awareness of the cause across borders and prompted international participation in emergency relief efforts as well as longer-term efforts to empower the marginalized.

The materials that were produced, both collectively and individually, in the movement show how the concern for children was the prime mover for the artists’ intuitive actions and sustained commitment. The children depicted in the materials cast a gaze full of individual will toward the viewers, betraying adult expectations of what a child should be. They reflect the artist’s attitude of refraining from echoing both the logic that views children as incomplete adults in the process of becoming and the worldview of adults built upon the hierarchy of the developed over the underdeveloped. The presence of children is imagined here as a mediating entity that invalidates external/internal divisions, inviting us to engage in finding and reading the stories of what might otherwise be buried under the structures built and run by those in power.

The title, Panultol, is a Kinaray-a word meaning “to go to a familiar or unfamiliar place with no maps or directions.” It is a process that is guided by gut feeling or subjective decisions and it can also mean tracing back someone’s ancestors or genealogy. The exhibition, inspired by the layers of meanings embedded in the term, presents artworks, historical materials in personal archives, and newly commissioned works, as well as printed materials from the curator’s ongoing research on international artists' solidarity against children's hunger in the island of Negros in the 1980s and 1990s. It proposes to trace paths paved by individual curiosity, observation, sensitivity, intuition, and commitment, which has guided the artists through the unknown journey under the shared imagination of a livable world for all.