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“You betrayed the Party just when you should have helped it” in Manila
A solo exhibition at the Vargas Museum in Manila emphasizes the possibilities of expressing trauma in language and searching for links in forgotten women’s histories.
7. 2. – 16. 3. 2023, Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines / Curators Irena Bekić and Anca Verona Mihuleț / Associate curator of the exhibition Tessa Maria Gauzon, UP Vargas Museum
Andreja Kulunčić’s exhibition “You Betrayed the Party When You Should Have Helped It”, which emerged from the project of the same name in collaboration with feminist cultural anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin and psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić, was installed at The Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center (1/ F Gallery, UP Vargas Museum) in Manila, Republic of the Philippines at the invitation of the respected curator Patrick Flores.
In the latest iteration of the project, emphasis is placed on the transformation of the female body subjected to psychological and physical torture and the potential for expressing trauma in language. Conceived to generate a process that unfolds as an experience and awareness of the visitor about the possibility of repression, rather than its reconstruction, the exhibition expands beyond the geographical references of historical events and specific museum presentations, where the memories of former prisoners serve as a fragile foundation for the consolidation of women’s history and discourse on female trauma. Through translation workshops of testimonies by former prisoners conducted by the artist and forms of memory dissemination in which the audience participates, such as taking posters from a special edition printed for this occasion, the place of historical trauma is symbolically activated, devoid of modern forms of public recognition.
Methodologically, it is an anti-monument, a commemorative form that does not impose memory, but seeks it in the constantly renewing permeation of disputed memories and the cognitions and feelings of the audience. The anti-monument thereby opens the process of decentralization of collective memory, as one of the filters for accepting the past. In this sense, it actively encourages discussions about how we remember, what we remember and what role the past plays in the future.
The exhibition includes continuous workshops for making female figurines from clay dedicated to the unrecorded history of Philippine women. It is a social ritual that allows participants to filter the collective inheritance of a traumatic past, and at the same time brings a new perspective on the representativeness of the female body.
The exhibition at the Jorge Vargas Museum is conceived as a space of various flows. It transforms into an island, an island-like ambiance, a site of memory, a simulacrum of an island, a conduit for experience, a link between past events and memory. It creates a space for reflection and complementary thinking that encompasses visual materials – drawings, photographs, and objects – produced through artistic research; a place for gestural interpretation of the daily torture of women on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur in the form of a three-channel video installation featuring performances by three artists – contemporary dancer Zrinka Užbinec, instrumentalist Jasna Jovićević, and vocalist Annette Giesriegl. Through the medium of movement, voice, and sound, they recreate the oppressive daily life of prisoners in individual and collective performances on the site. Additionally, it incorporates a zone of participation, which includes the mentioned workshops and forms of audience participation in memory dissemination, where participatory threads constantly reconfigure mechanisms of understanding marginal historical phenomena.
Realization of the exhibition: coordinator, UP Vargas Museum: Kara De Guzman / coordinator, National Commission for Culture and the Arts: Jeanne Severo / design: Gian Delgado / photography: Ivo Martinović / The exhibition in Manila was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Republic of the Philippines.