London Biennale

"Binukot kang Pinagpala: Buenafe"

In the essay titled "Maidens Shrouded in Darkness," author Resil Mojares enumerated several manifestations of the cloistered figure in the rich epic narratives, beliefs, rituals and community practices in the Philippines.

"The "marking off" of bodies and spaces can assume richly polysemous forms. This is shown in the use of the veil and other kinds of body covering, most prominently illustrated in the Islamic hejaab, which can, according to place and culture, range from a "partial veil" (a scarf covering the head) to a "full veil" (a garment that covers the whole body, except the eyes). Often reductively viewed as a form of female oppression, such body covering is multivalent, signifying gender and generational status, socioeconomic position, family honor, and ethnic and religious identity. Most basic, it involves control of the personal bodily space of a woman, especially in relation to spatial relationships between men and women.   

While the veil is associated with modesty in Catholic-devotional practice, women can manipulate it, concealing or revealing themselves for deception, seduction, or the freedom of anonymity. Where visibility and legibility are important for social control, the veil can be subversive in its uses. Veiled, women were "able to conceal or reveal their faces at will, to pass for other than what they really were, to navigate public spaces as they pleased, and – perhaps most unsettling of all – to circumvent the authority of male relatives, church, and state.

The binukot is a person endowed with some or all of these attributes: beauty, charisma, magical skills, and such gifts as being the bearer of the community's memory, the singer of traditions. At the heart of claustration is the idea that separation, purification and concentration are generative of power."

The "Binukot kang Pinagpala" series traverses this complex play of visibility and invisibility as a method of "marking off" selected, isolated, secluded, enclosed, cloistered, and reduced bodies, spaces, and individual histories. The veil (crafted out of dried pig intestines) and the act of veiling cast irony to the ambivalent meaning of "binukot" raising questions of what is enclosed and excluded, who is being protected from what, who is empowered, valued, devalued, and/or immobilized in this time and age.