Exhibitions
Silverlens Galleries, Manila
Apr 26 - May 25, 2024
Video still from Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?, 2021
All images by courtesy of Silverlens Galleries and artists
Previously exhibited in major institutions including the Tate Modern in London, UK and Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Canada, Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? is an affirming techno-feminist vision of a future in which ancestral knowledge and new technologies converge. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a video/virtual-reality installation of the same title, a speculative documentary that narrates the story of a spiritual medium known as Piña. As a form of artificial intelligence, Piña is able to receive and collect inherited knowledge, messages, and dreams from people around the world in order to secure their survival.
Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser, Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (video still), 2021.
Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? features footage shot in the Philippines and Ecuador, where the artists have family histories. Its video component includes interviews with activists and healers from local organizations such as the Indigenous feminist collective Cyber Amazonas in Puyo, and Las Martinas de Piedras Negras in Quito, both in Ecuador; as well as with a shaman or Babaylan, in Palawan, Philippines. These are interspersed with footage of agricultural landscapes, abandoned buildings amid lush forests, and documentation of ritual activities carried out by the interviewees. Through an emphasis on matriarchal lineages and their modes of knowledge transmission, the artists consider how precolonial ways of being have survived into the present in spite of their ongoing violent oppression.
About STEPHANIE COMILANG
Stephanie Comilang (b.1980, Toronto, Canada) is an artist living and working in Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at the Tate Modern, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Julia Stoschek Collection, and Haus der Kunst. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
About SIMON SPEISER
Simon Speiser (b.1988, Regensburg, Germany) is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Placing a variety of media and disciplines in dialogue with one another—ranging from writing, sculpture, and printing to video and VR installations—Speiser’s work expands the possibilities between art and science fiction. He has exhibited at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, MMK Frankfurt, CAC Quito, Oracle Berlin, Croy Nielsen, MMCA Seoul, and Robert Grunenberg Berlin, among others.
