Bazaar & Exhibition
Market Encounter runs from February 1-3, 2009 on the ground floor of the National Museum of the Filipino, from 9 am to 5 pm. Merchants will showcase a colorful and exciting range of textiles being woven in the Philippines and Indonesia today. The booths will feature traditional and contemporary woven fabrics and goods from weaving communities across the country, as well as clothing items from Philippine designers using indigenous textile and selected pieces from ASEAN countries. The textile pieces will include those woven with backstrap looms, handlooms, and floor looms, using cotton, silk, piña, sinamay, jusi, abaca, and other natural fibers.
T/ISSUE: Cloth and Its Complications in Southeast Asia
The exhibition presents three ensembles of early 20th century clothing and jewelry originating from the Philippine B’laan and Ga’dang peoples, and the Tetum people of the island of Timor. The extremely focused exhibition, which will draw attention to few instead of many artefacts from different ethnolinguistic groups, is curated to raise the level of awareness of complex challenges traditional textiles pose to academics and cultural workers who wish to preserve this heritage. The exhibition points out that these social, economic and aesthetic complexities issue from the extraordinary levels of refinement of these textiles. Complex materials will pose complex problems, as the originating cultures transition from archaic to post-industrial worlds. T/ISSUE asserts that without this idea, assistance programs run the risk of eroding—not just the textile traditions—but the forms of being human these traditions represent.
In this exhibition, therefore, old clothing ensembles “ask” eloquently for depth of understanding.
T/ISSUE will bring together artifacts from private collectors from the Philippines and Indonesia, and in this sense will be an unprecedented exhibition. The National Museum of the Philippines is the ideal setting for this exhibition, in that early 20th century textiles from its collection will be on exhibit at a nearby gallery, for viewers to make cross-references.
National Museum of the Filipino People
Exhibition Curated by Marian Pastor Roces
Opens to the public February 4, 2009
Marian Pastor Roces theorizes museum practice, clothing, identity politics, contemporary art institutions, and curatorship. She also works as a curator, involving conceptual and installation artists in social history museum projects. As founding partner of TAO INC, a museum development corporation established in the Philippines, Pastor Roces works the intersection between curatorship and activism. TAO has established and redeveloped 7 major museums in the Philippines and curated two Philippine Pavilions for World Expos. In 2006, she convened an international conference on “The Politics of Beauty” with funding from the Prince Claus Fund of the Netherlands. She is presently undertaking doctoral research on the accelerated urbanization of Perth, Western Australia, with the Centre for Cultural Research of the University of Western Sydney. She is the author of the 1992 book Philippine Ancestral Weave and co-author of a work in progress: a comparative study of Philippine and Indonesian textiles.
