Of Encounters with Land and Data Sets (Published in ART SG)

Excerpt from ART SG. Read more here.

The Drawing Room recently opened two solo exhibitions reflecting on aspects of Filipino existence: Mark Salvatus’s ‘Crackling for a Piece of the Moon’ and Christina Lopez’s ‘Pro Forma’. Salvatus uses a topographical point of view to survey land and space, from his early life in the province to living as an artist in the city. He subtly presented access to land, home, and social justice in works of paper, found objects, and acrylic scratches. Meanwhile, Lopez explores ways of visualizing big data and the vagueness and abstractions of algorithms. She worked on the technologies and ideas used in manufacturing perception that spilled over in the country’s elections. Surprisingly, despite the different trajectories explored in the exhibitions, from the tactility of land to the concept of data, both artists reveal nuances in the lived reality of our experiences, including unequal access to an acceptable quality of life, continuous oppression and exploitation, and deeply embedded social injustice.