ALFREDO AND ISABEL AQUILIZAN
Alfredo Juan Aquilizan and Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan’s ‘Project: Be-longing’ has traced over the past decade the Filipino diaspora from Brisbane to Busan, from Havana to Tokyo and beyond. As Filipino curator and critic Patrick Flores summates, these artists work is about ‘collecting and the collective’.1 Their presence on the biennale circuit is unparalleled by any other Filipino artist, starting with their inclusion in the 3rd Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane (1999), Fukuoka’s Inaugural Asian Art Triennial, the 6th Havana Biennale, Hou Hanru’s 50th Venice Biennale, biennales in Biwako and Gwangju, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and most recently, Charles Mereweather’s Biennale of Sydney. Such a saturating presence raises all sorts of questions about the formulaic or repetitious nature of biennales, but it also indicates that in these environments works such as the Aquilizans’ that draw on collective cultural memory and sentimentality make a resounding connection with a global audience.
When an installation of everyday objects is placed within the museum—traditionally a place where various elements speak as a cohesive totality giving meaning—value is constructed. Flores argues this ‘value’ is not merely cultural but fiscal as, he says, ‘…objects assume the status of commodities and artists become coveted signatures in their own right, [and] values are accordingly calibrated within a cultural field that commands its own worth’.2 From this perspective, one could argue that the collected object has increasingly become a kind of ‘art world collateral’ used by the Aquilizans, both as a signature for the Filipino—a halo halo of assimilation—and their own artistic identity.
But what happens to that value or ‘worth’, as Flores puts it, when the artist is transposed to an alternate environment that could be described as... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline