MODULE: DANCING THE SHRIMP (WHODOYOUTHINKYOUARE)
Motions of this Kind: Propositions and Problems of Belatedness
curated by
Merv Espina
Renan Laru-an
Rafael Schacter
Dancing the Shrimp (whodoyouthinkyouare) operates at the intersection of history, fiction, and personal subjectivity, presenting a rhizomatic engagement with memory, labor, and ecological displacement. Conceived for Motions of this Kind: Propositions and Problems of Belatedness at The Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University College London, the work interrogates historical narratives by emphasizing the interpretative process and the delicate interplay between authenticity and invention. Through the insertion of fiction into historical frameworks, the module foregrounds the repressed, marginalized, or overlooked aspects of history, in line with Michel de Certeau’s notion of the “repressed” within dominant discourses.
The installation synthesizes new and existing works across painting, photography, sculpture, plant matter, and site-specific objects, generating a multilayered tableau that oscillates between permanence and impermanence. Trompe l’oeil sculptures, drawing inspiration from the Chinese tradition of “scholars’ rocks”, are carefully painted, finished, and installed on bespoke pedestals composed of found, borrowed, or purchased objects. These pedestals, like the rocks themselves, function as catalysts for recognition, situating the quotidian and the precious, the banal and the singular, in a shared relational field. The stage-like installation transforms into a landscape of personified bodies, mountains, waves, and clouds, inviting a symbiotic relationship between viewer, object, and site.
Historically and conceptually, the work draws upon research into 18th-century Filipino settlements in the Louisiana Bayou and the Manila Village in Barataria Bay, Mississippi, where settlers engaged in the ritualized labor of shelling shrimp by foot, an act referred to as “dancing the shrimp.” This labor, simultaneously rhythmic, repetitive, and precarious, informs both the material and conceptual strategies of the installation. Through its layering of found, archival, and newly fabricated objects, the module functions as a palimpsest of histories and imaginaries: each gesture, material choice, and spatial arrangement preserves traces of lived experience while refracting them through fictional and aestheticized frameworks.
In Dancing the Shrimp, Cuyson advances a Memory Module that situates art-making as both an analytic and contemplative practice. The work emphasizes the porosity between fact and fiction, history and narrative, object and observer, demonstrating how memory—both collective and personal—can be reinterpreted, contested, and re-imagined within a mutable, ecological, and performative space. As a Memory Module, it underscores the dynamic potential of the exhibition to act as a node within a broader rhizomatic framework, linking narratives across time, place, and medium, while challenging viewers to reconsider the fluid boundaries between reality and imagination, permanence and ephemerality.
Dancing The Shrimp (whodoyouthinkyouare)
Multivariable installation with constructed, found and purchased objects, sculpture, sound, sewn fabrics, drawings, lights, headset, and vinyl stickers
Dimensions variable
2019
2019 / The Brunei Gallery / SOAS University of College London / England
MEMORY MODULE: DANCING THE SHRIMP
The stage is set for scenes that rise above the surface, barely above the level. The ground circulates around the museum. In fact, the museum becomes it, surrounded by details of a moving theater, or better still, aspects of design that make this theater quite present though also quite elusive, dispersed like the semblance of sea around it.
The trace to history is sheer but salient. Filipino mariners in the nineteenth century jumped off the fabled Manila Galleon and settled in Saint Malo in the Louisiana bayou. This was the kernel of a community that in the 1930s morphed into the Manila Village in Barataria Bay in the Mississippi Delta by the Gulf of Mexico. From such a site came the Manila Men who took off the shells of shrimps by the nimble movement of their adroit feet, conjuring a kind of dance that is also intense, obsessive labor.
The exhibition speaks to this historical moment and restages it across a range of devices that transpose the said narrative or event and its effects. A beguiling scenography thus is created, animated by remixed music of ritual chant and electronic drone, sprawling painting, enigmatic text, costume, museum memorabilia and furniture, and the pervasive tint of blue from both fluorescent and decal. The artist performs diverse roles in making all this happen: researcher, production designer, creative director, music mixer, painter. In this heady ensemble, the tale of the Filipino seafarer named Kerel is inevitably evoked, a traveler across time zones, mired in the fine grain of work, in the silhouette of structure, in a world of water.
While the tangent of history is cast cogently, the mode of knowing is mythic, intuitive, aleatory. The body inhabits a space of fantasy, memory, and the very urgent experiment of figuring out a liquid present: the eye is fooled, the senses swim in various data (sand, mannequin, mirror), and the migrant in the museum finally faces and feels the artifice of relations, or those ties that put in place or shed those layers of self. - Dr. Patrick D. Flores
2016 / Vargas Museum / Philippines
MODULE: DREAM SEQUENCE #88 (Sea of Love)
South by Southeast: A Further Surface
Common is the notion that the south lies at the opposite of north and that the north is supposedly ascendant, more prone to power, and closer to the imagined center. The south is cast as the peripheral and the dispossessed and that it gathers at the perceived fringes of provinces on a map of asymmetries. Such a curious psycho-geographical, or geopolitical, imagination yields another antinomy: the west and the east, bearing more or less equivalent valences as north and south. This procedure of organizing the world reduces the latter into polarities and verticalities, the west is modern and everywhere yet the east is timeless and afar. The situation where the south and the east cohere to form the coordinate of the southeast is exceptional. It is possibly a double negation: not north, not west. And as such, it is a productive locus: it is not the center, twice.
Commencing from a specific geography and a state of mind to generate a certain way of observing and understanding locality, the exhibition discusses the spectral idea of artistic initiative through the lens of materiality and reciprocity as poignant and also resolute stances. The body of works presented in the exhibition centers on the “Southeast” as a trope to understand the world today.
The exhibition extends the original concept of South by Southeast held in Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong in March 2015 by the invitation of Guangdong Times Museum. It is a gesture of the Times Museum to trace its location to Southeastern China and to take part in mediating the imageries and geopolitical implications of the “Southeast” that were brought to the fore in the first part of the exhibition. Artists from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe are convened to create an experience and a climate that evoke the structure of the Southeast.
Co-curated by Patrick D. Flores (The Philippines) and Anca Verona Mihuleţ(Romania)
2016 / Guangdong Times Museum / China
MEMORY MODULE: KEREL
”Kerel” takes its inspiration from the German avant-garde filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle, which is a film adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest. Cuyson’s “Kerel” puts at its center the narrative of the sea and weaves the tale of a queer Filipino sailor at work on a ship. Using found footage, film, drawing, painting, sculpture and set design, Jon Cuyson transforms the gallery space into the interior and exterior of a container ship simultaneously blurring the lines of art and design. The resulting installation shuttles between desire and conflict with dream and reality to anchor the fluctuating waves of the undefined narrative while pinpointing what is at stake in the dismantling of the self. The exhibit reflects on notions of identity, authorship, desire, and memory. For Cuyson, art making is an inclusionary space that can both question and acknowledge the historical and logical conditions of its existence in the context of the present. Thus, his works emphasize a concern for a site in flux, vulnerable and malleable where change is not only possible but also continuously taking place.
2013 / 1335 Mabini / Philippines
