Maria Taniguchi and Kawayan De Guia 2011 Ateneo Art Awards Winners
Posted by Jorge B. Vargas Museum ⋅ August 13, 2011
The Vargas Museum would like to congratulate Maria Taniguchi and Kawayan De Guia for winning at the 2011 Ateneo Art Awards. Taniguchi bagged the Common Room Networks Foundation Residency Grant for Echo Studies which ran from March 30 to May 28, 2011 while De Guia received the La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre Residency Grant for Bomba which ran from June 18 to December 18, 2010, both at the Vargas Museum.
Echo Studies reflected Taniguchi’s practice in the “sublimation of the intersections in information sharing and research”. It focused on how the researcher’s decisions, sensitivities, and process continuously challenge scientific objectivity in the creation and manipulation of data. Taniguchi probed relationships among subject, representation, and process by employing sound, video, painting, drawing, and installation.
Bomba featured disco balls fashioned into rocket bombs of different sizes suspended at varying heights from the museum’s ceiling, re-worked jukebox and a video projection. De Guia recalled the days of disco with the mirror bombs radiating at variable speeds coupled with pop music interspersed with random sounds. Bomba, aside from its reference to military weapons, also evokes a local film genre of hardcore porn of the same name, thus evoking concepts of violence, sex, rituals of domination and power juxtaposed with longing and nostalgia through the re-worked jukebox and music.
