MEMORY MODULE ACTIVATION: LINE OF SIGHT
Line of Sight
Curated by Jon Cuyson
Nice Buenaventura
Karl Castro
Jon Cuyson
Eric Ramos Guerrero
Galleria Duemila
6 May - June 20, 2023
Galleria Duemila presents the group exhibition Line of Sight, featuring the works of Nice Buenaventura, Karl Castro, Jon Cuyson, and Eric Ramos Guerrero. The Line of Sight or Axis Line is the imaginary line between an observer, spectator, or target. In communication, the line of sight is the direct path from a transmitter to the receiver. In this time of digitization and data accumulation, how are images and messages received and deployed when a clear line of sight is regularly obstructed and manipulated? The ability of works of art to generate nebulous concepts of affect is rooted in the contemporary understanding of the audience and the artist. An image or other visual artwork becomes an object of attention necessary for viewer engagement to produce effect. How do artists negotiate the relationship between maker and viewer? What occurs when that engagement becomes obscured? What strategies do image makers utilize to retain agency? How are subjectivity and knowledge formed without a clear line of sight?
The group exhibition brings together four artists working in diverse media but connected by their interest in the intersection of history and visual culture. Accessing personal and collective memory, they bring complex underrepresented narratives relating to their biography and contemporary socio-political concerns. The artist and curator, Jon Cuyson initiated the underlying idea of the group’s intersecting reflections. The exhibition opens on May 6 and continues until June 20, 2023.
Galleria Duemila is at 201 Loring Street 1300 Pasay City, Manila, Philippines. Online reservations can be made via www.galleriaduemila.com with telephone numbers +63288319990 & +639276294612.
MEMORY MODULE: SOS
SOS situates itself within Jon Cuyson’s ongoing investigation of abstraction, horizontality, and maritime narratives, operating at the intersection of painting, installation, and moving image. Presented at Galleria Duemila, the works deploy repetitive layering, mark-making, and geometric abstraction to construct surfaces that both recede and advance, articulating tensions between presence and absence, stability and flux. Horizontality emerges as a formal and conceptual strategy, functioning as a resistant counterpoint to vertical hierarchies and normative structures, while simultaneously indexing temporality, labor, and affective experience.
The module’s titular reference to the maritime distress signal, SOS (Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls) , operates as both semiotic and metaphoric anchor, situating the abstract compositions within histories of maritime labor, human vulnerability, and ecological precarity. Through the juxtaposition of layered acrylic surfaces, collaged elements, and video imagery of the sea and dripping paint, Cuyson’s work enacts a poetics of memory and contingency, rendering abstraction as a site of contemplative engagement.
SOS exemplifies the conceptual logic of the Memory Module framework: each gesture, medium, and temporal interval functions rhizomatically, generating relational links across projects while mediating between interior and exterior registers of experience. The module thus operates simultaneously as an aesthetic object, a site of critical reflection, and a contemplative archive of human and ecological entanglements.
2022 / Galleria Duemila / Philippines
HEAVY ROTATIONS
Whatever does the archival mean, and how can one think of the archive beyond the (imagined) spaces of climate-controlled vaults and dusty libraries? Through the works of artists Jon Cuyson, Moe Myat May Zarchi and Miti Ruangkritya, the exhibition Heavy Rotations explores larger questions of how historical consciousness, social memories and private accounts are shaped and created in contemporary Southeast Asia. These lines of inquiry endeavour to propose a new vocabulary for rethinking the archive in this age of hyper-networked digital media.
A reference to a practice in the radio broadcast industry—where stations maintain a list of songs that get the most airplay to play throughout the day—the exhibition title parallels the processes by which archival images have been adapted, remixed, and propagated to speculate on the possibilities of collective narratives, past and present.
This exhibition is co-curated with the Moving Picture Experiment Group (MPEG), an itinerant curatorial and research collective exploring the polyvalency of the moving image medium in contemporary practices across Asia. MPEG seeks to investigate and instigate hybridised modes of image-making, and is initiated and led by artists Alfonse Chiu, Adar Ng and Dave Lim.
2022 / Esplanade / Singapore
MODULE: SEA OF SILENCE
SEA OF SILENCE is an experimental documentary-fiction that probes the liminal spaces between presence and absence, life and death, through the reworking of memory and archival trace. By weaving archival photos, found footage, and speculative imagery, the film interrogates colonial and labor histories while exploring the entanglements of human and nonhuman actors across land and sea.
Framed by queer ecologies and wet ontologies, the archive becomes a porous, mutable space where subjectivities are unsettled and reassembled. Labor, containment, and mobility are reconsidered within both terrestrial and oceanic realms, revealing the negotiation between freedom, constraint, and survival. In its interplay of memory, materiality, and speculative narration, SEA OF SILENCE invites reflection on histories that are simultaneously personal, collective, and ecological, proposing alternative temporalities and relationalities that emerge from the depths of past and present.
Synopsis: A silent yet omniscient voice drifts across time, searching the past to uncover hidden currents of memory and belonging. Through fragments of stories and forgotten histories, it traces intimate connections between family, labor, colonialism, and the sea , a vast, living archive that binds them all. The narrative moves fluidly between personal and collective memory, revealing how migration, maritime toil, and ancestral longing are entangled with the forces of empire and environmental change. Within this shifting seascape, the sea becomes both witness and participant, carrying with it the weight of untold desires, ruptures, and returns.
Digital Video (Black and White finish)
13'30"
2021
MEMORY MODULE: KEREL TRILOGY
The KEREL Trilogy comprises three black-and-white experimental short films, MUTYA, NANAY CLEO’S DREAM, and KEREL (Sea of Love), centered on the life of Kerel, a queer Filipino seafarer who traverses time and space. The trilogy draws inspiration from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle, itself an adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest, yet reframes the narrative through a postcolonial and queer Filipino lens, foregrounding questions of identity, intimacy, and belonging.
Utilizing a hybrid methodology that interweaves archival, found, and newly filmed footage, the films function as memory modules, enacting a rhizomatic exploration of Kerel’s relationships, with his lover, his family, and his nation, while challenging conventional temporalities and narrative structures. Through processes of revision, layering, and recomposition, the trilogy negotiates the entanglements of personal, historical, and ecological memory, reflecting Cuyson’s broader artistic practice, which operates at the intersection of abstraction, queer ecologies, and the poetics of the sea.
MUTYA
Director: Jon Cuyson
Writer: Jon Cuyson
Length: 8 Mins. 10 Seconds
Format: Digital Video in Black & White Finish
Dialogue: Tagalog
Subtitles: English
Producer: EVERYDAY PRODUCTIONS
Country: Philippines
Year: 2021
Synopsis:
Set in the present, Mutya follows a shy transgender woman who tends to the blind mother of her OFW seafarer boyfriend, Kerel. Anchored in an intimate, possibly imagined phone conversation, the film unfolds as a dreamlike exploration of desire, anxiety, and emotional distance.
ANG PANAGINIP NI NANAY CLEO
(NANAY CLEO’S DREAM)
Director: Jon Cuyson
Writer: Jon Cuyson
Length: 11 Mins.
Format: Digital Video in Black and White Finish
Dialogue: Tagalog
Subtitles: English
Producer: EVERYDAY PRODUCTIONS
Country: Philippines
Year: 2021
Synopsis
Nanay Cleo, a visually impaired Babaylan, a Filipino precolonial shaman, senses danger threatening her seafarer son. Drawing on her ancestral powers, she invokes protective rituals, navigating the liminal space between intuition, spiritual authority, and maternal devotion.
KEREL (SEA OF LOVE)
Director: Jon Cuyson
Writer: Jon Cuyson
Length: 14 Mins. 30 Seconds
Format: Digital Video in Black and White Finish
Dialogue: Tagalog
Subtitles: English
Producer: EVERYDAY PRODUCTIONS
Country: Philippines
Year: 2021
SYNOPSIS
Trapped in a cargo ship during the lockdown, Kerel, a queer Filipino seafarer escapes through his memory, and recalls his complicated past, present, and future self.