Lurking in a statement by Phillipine writer and curator Emmanuel Torres lies the foundation upon which Norberto Roldan's work springs. Torres believes that "...a common feature of Phillipine cultural life is its faith in supernatural or preternatural forces..."1. Torres is not talking exclusively about the religiousity of a people, but rather the nuances of a collective psyche rooted in a religion that has evolved from 16th century Spanish colonization and one that is sutured to a folkloric embrace of the animist object and a society of make-do aesthetics and brand fakery.It is a psyche where institutionalized religion co-exists with politics and commercial zeal, where shopping malls are accomodated with Chapels, Catholic cathedrals are circumnavigated by amulet vendors and revolutions that topple governments are immortalized through statues of Mary the Holy Mother. The object is integral as the potrayer of methaphor and truth and kitsch flavors it with a distinctly local piquent. What is sacred and what is profane becomes and interwoven territory deeply embedded in Phillipine society.
In the same way, Norberto Roldan's work ascribes to a more layered reading of religion in contemporary society. While Roldan's past may well from his socially conscious roots as a founding member of the provincial collective 'Black Artists of Asia', this trilogy of exhibitions describes a personal visual vocabulary aggregated over time. It is an alert examination of the deification of gods gyrating against the erosion of the object and the proliferation of the mass-produced. As Roldan says of his work, "If it has something to say about religion, it is the dialectic materialism in the belief system that should come to play."2. In essence, Roldan's decade-long collection of objects is foremost an 'ethnographic cache', to use his words, that is regurgitated and re-subscribed to across his career.
Central to this exhibition is a reworked piece that perhaps best illustrates this sense of accumulation or chameleon layering. "Objects and Apparations" [2006-09]. First shown at the Alliance-Francaise de Manile (2006), its two domestic shrines were presented backed by a projection of the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais. As objects the alters are familiar to our everyday, making them relatively benign and yet, when presented at eye level and placed within a gallery environment they become quiet, provocative and charged in the context of the film. One wonders whether the object's transformation from sacred to profane reflects the truncated pace of our digitized world, as fragments dramatically caught on-screen. Roldan elaborates, "...in the context of contemporary geopolitics, religion has been used so many times either to wage war, or to sow terror, both anathema to almost all religions or religious tenets"3. It is the reality of a post-911 world.
This methaphor of media illumination is perhaps best illustrated by the second presentation of "Objects and Apparitions" for Roldan's 2008 solo exhibition at Manila's Mo Space. Here the altars were filled with light, their sacred enlightenment provided by a hardware store bought floodlight and playing of the ping of conceptual triggers. Propagated terror has been replaced by the most banal of objects. The presentation of the two shrines at TAKSU, however, is perhaps the more revealing version. Filled with objects collected during Roldan's stay in Malaysia, they became vessels of pan-religiousity corraling humanity 'under one roof'. Roldan engages the metaphoric possibilities of common, locally available objects to reflect upon the shifting constructions of order, categories and meaning. It is an astutue picture of contemporary Asian society in flux.
In the same way that “Objects and Apparitions” tethers Roldan’s career across a 3-year span, two suites of assemblages in the genre of American Joseph Cornell capture Roldan’s ability to siphon an object’s ability to communicate across time. Roldan’s “Memory Boxes” take their cue from his 1999 exhibition “Faith in Sorcery, Sorcery in Faith” at Hiraya Gallery, Manila and, perhaps more familiar locally, his work in the Singapore Art Museum collection.
Housed in Cuban cigar boxes, Roldan plays off cerebral and emotive triggers plucked from a database of objects: estampitas [holy pictures], anting anting and bottles of native ‘remedies’, metal amulets, faded photographs and plastic superheroes. It is symbology as energetic and popularist as a Dan Brown novel oscillating between folk religiosity and popular culture with the efficiency of a Haiku.
While the cigar box may whiff of nostalgic eye candy as a mini menagerie it also points to argi-politics, of Cuban contraband paralleling a local tale of Philippine tobacco industries used as leverage for political concession. The truth is, Roldan’s cigar box is just an available object found in a thrift store. It is our compulsion to lay meaning over objects and images that blurs truth.
What emerges repeatedly across these two exhibitions, “Everything is Sacred” [TAKSU Kuala Lumpur] and “Profane Is the New Sacred” [TAKSU Singapore], is not the particularity or endorsement of religion as a powerbase but the sense of questioning what we hold sacred in contemporary society. The object has become increasingly aspirational, manufactured and disposable. The ability to trans-locate it and yet maintain its veneration – whether celebrated by an adult who grew up on Power Rangers in Manila, a 6-year Malaysian boy hip on Transformers or an Australian kid who believes in both Santa Claus and Jesus – reiterates the ability of visual media to communicate collective belief in the ‘unbelievable’. As Roldan’s title suggests, ‘profane is the new sacred’.
A second suite of assemblages, “Sacred Devotions (2009)” extends Roldan’s passion for collecting and collating but frames the object within the intimate space of the domestic shrine. Characterized by their ‘wall papered’ backgrounds, the assemblages evoke tradition, mothballs and family narratives. The are akin to Chinese ancestral altars with their offerings of coca-cola or liquor and sense of moral fabric wrapped in superstitions and respect. In Roldan’s words, “It’s about how people manifest their devotions.”4.
Take for example “Sacred Devotion 04 (2009) that places a tin box branded with the text, ‘President Ferdinand E. Marcos Rural Medical Program Barrio Captain Health Kit’ central to its collection of paraphernalia. It sets the tone for this assemblage, paired with images of Mary as protectress in various forms, an image of a ‘modern couple’ and empty bottles of virgin oil. It is the picture of the healthy family and good morals.
The ‘Sacred Devotion’ assemblages were reworked from an earlier installation “Private Altars” [2003] commissioned by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Originally aligned along a 10-meter table dressed with lace altar cloths and capped off with light boxes of Latin text, for this exhibition Roldan has encapsulated the altars in vitrine-like museum cases. I am reminded of Thai traveling icons that house their devotions in small wood shrines worn around the neck or carried in a pocket. That sense of mobility of divinity has a currency with ‘the box’ as a shipping device, from aspirational white goods to Philippine Balikbayan boxes that carry a domestic worker’s most treasure belongings between countries. The vessel itself becomes loaded with association.
Box or grid, our human compulsion to collect, order, file, locate culturally, digest and assimilate visual iconography is an interesting one when over layed with the semiotics of ‘a frame’, that is boxed-in, pigeon-holed, quarantined, defined…or to use Roldan’s word, rendered ‘sacred’. It moves well beyond the realm of religion or identity politics.
In the same way that Roldan has adopted ‘the container’ to present his work, he has long included found photographs in his art making, from his assemblages discussed to large-scale digital banners and more recently manifesting as photo-real painted images. For this reason, I find the new series included in this exhibition, “We have nothing that is ours except time and memory” [2009] a pivotal conduit across Roldan’s career. While one is immediately caught by its grid formation and sense of order, they are drawn into its system of framing with a curiosity for the object.
A silver cigarette case, a compact mirror, a petite-point sample stained with age, lace mantilla backdrops: Roldan presents objects without their owners, re-compositing history. Their anonymity and repetition prevents us from getting bogged down in sentimentality, rather it is their formal precision that becomes their mantra. Roldan explains, “I often use the grid as a visual device…the grid [echoes] the niches one finds in our colonial churches, sites of repetitive and endless litanies and novenas one recites in times of adversities, just like when one anticipates the appearance of the superhero in times of distress.”5.
It is a curious choice that the centerpiece for Roldan’s Singapore show is an installation made from vestments gifted to the artist by an uncle priest. Presented as a triptych spanning some 10 feet, the vestments hang on a framework housing bottles with kristo and are studded with metal amulets spelling out the words ‘Rix Salvo Rix’, an extract from an oration colloquially translated as ‘King Hail King’ or ‘King Save Us King’, a bastardization of Latin fusing Catholicism with animism. This piece is the pinnacle at which two ideas become one.
At the end of the day we are left with a unique and deeply personal visual language built upon memory, [dis]association and consideration. Is it sacred? Is it profane? The answer, like Roldan’s work itself, offers a fibrillation between the two states of thought coloured with the patina of global culture and Filipino kitsch. It is seductive as its source.
