Equator Art Projects is delighted to present You Must Change Your Life, a group exhibition by 11 artists from the Philippines. Curator Tony Godfrey asked a number of artists in Philippines, ‘Do you read poetry? Does poetry affect your work directy or indirectly? What do we mean when we call a work of art “poetic”? Do you see poetry as a sister art to painting?’

In the past poetry and painting were seen as the “sister arts”. The Roman writer Horace wrote in his Ars Poetica (c. 10 BC) that “ut pictura poesis” – “as is painting, so is poetry”. For many centuries most painters in Europe or China would have agreed with this. Many would use poetry as their main inspiration: Poussin or Delacroix for example. Many painters themselves wrote poetry: Michelangelo or Turner. In the twentieth century we find several poets (Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Rilke) obsessed with paintings.

And this is not just an issue for painting: it seems to me there is a good deal of conceptual or post-conceptual art that we experience as “poetic”?” It seems to me that, for example, some installation art is highly poetic in that objects are used almost as images or metaphors in poetry are. The associations that objects carry matter in a similar way. 

Eleven leading artists in the Philippines have agreed to participate in this exhibition: Leslie de Chavez, Mariano Ching, Mark Justiniani, Joy Mallari, Lui Medina, Wawi Navarroza, Elaine Navas, Manuel Ocampo, Gary Ross Pastrana, Yasmin Sison, Gerry Tan. Each was asked to choose a poem for the catalogue, which may or may not relate to their actual artwork.