Video on Demand 2 August 2024, 11:00 - 12:00
Dialogue2 August 2024, 14:40 - 16:00
TThis video presentation shares stories and learnings from two exhibitions at the University of the Philippines (UP) Fine Arts Gallery, titled Warm Bodies: Defending the Right to Dissent (26 January - 17 February 2024) and Warm Bodies II: On Art, Labor, and Proletarian Movements (May 15-31, 2024), organized with the Concerned Artists of the Philippines as a cultural strategy for an art institution to converse with concurrent socio-political events. Combining works from the permanent collection of the College of Fine Arts and objects of demonstration (1aspace, 2002-04) or "disobedient objects" (V&A Museum, 2014) created in the midst of protest, the presentation asserts how exhibition-making is a mode of unpacking the crisis on human rights and labor. By surfacing meaningful conversations and critical discourse between artworks, practices, and archives, Warm Bodies re-deploys a term in collections management towards engaging with precarious contexts beyond the gallery site.
Lisa Ito-Tapang (Lisa Ito) is a cultural worker, writer, and independent curator. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theory, College of Fine Arts (UPCFA) at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where she has been teaching art history, theory, and criticism since 2012. She is the Curator of the UP Fine Arts Gallery, the official exhibition site and creative compound of the UPCFA.
She is the Secretary-General of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP), an organization of progressive artists founded in 1983.
She received her B Fine Arts (major in Art History) from the UPCFA and her Master of Arts in Art Studies (major in Art History) from the UP College of Arts and Letters.
She is among the fellows of "Condition Report", a Southeast Asia-wide curatorial development program of the Japan Foundation from 2015-2017. She has been active in the practice of art writing since 2002. She served as a member of the board of judges for the Metrobank Art and Design Excellence Award (MADE) competition in 2022, the Ateneo Art Awards - Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art from 2019-2020, and the Ateneo Art Awards - Purita Kalaw Ledesma Prize for Art Criticism in 2017.