Heady and Hearty Mixes: Zero In Hybridity
Zero In, a consortium of the country’s five leading private museums, takes on the notion of the crossbreed exploration of likeness and variance on its sixth year.

This year’s theme is Zero In: Hybridity which presents hybridization in all its forms. The specific interpretative frames constructed by each museum pitches for a critical re-thinking of what and how fusions are realized.

To kick off the series of exhibitions, Ayala Museum opened Hybridity: Mark Lewis Higgins (photo, right) on September 18, 2007. The exhibit counts on the symbolic potentials of the deliberate layering of materials done alongside a crossing over into a variety of disciplines such as history, religion, geography, and archaeology. Born in Manila to an Irish-American father and a Chinese-Filipino mother, this is the first time Higgins is showing his series before proceeding on to New York. In this exhibit, he literally pieces together surfaces and stories, aptly hinging on a body of work articulating personal diaspora and the working out of questions of origin and destination.

Lopez Memorial Museum places Hybridity within the context of artistic agency. Blur Part of Zero In: Hybridity. Lopez Memorial Museum places Hybridity within the context of artistic agency. It subtly draws upon the creative practice of a survey of artists represented in the museum collection., bringing together the works of Jose Tence Ruiz, Lyra Abueg Garcellano, Santiago Bose (photo, left), Nonoy Marcelo, Onib Olmedo, Ang Kiukok, and Cesar Legaspi. Blur recognizes traces of negotiations, wranglings, appropriations, and erasures—how the hybrid not only brings up the idea of newness but also of movement as opposed to stasis, as well as residue or debris in its formulation.

Bahay Tsinoy’s Comida China opens on November 10, 2007 references a gustatory meeting of cultures, insinuated within historical accounts that easily remind us that what now apparently appears as ‘seamless fusion’ cuisine is not only about an enriching encounter, but also chips away at prejudice and insistence on rabid notions of purity. Comida China is one of many modest tales about indigenization- -why component elements survive and why others (owing to social as well as political dynamics) become relegated to memory.

Museo Pambata invokes interdisciplinarity in the context of alternative education and child advocacy in Child’s ART —Advocacy, Rights, and Thoughts which opens on November 17, 2007. By bringing together productions from the Museo’s Children’s Advocacy Program and works by children from the Angono Regional Pilot School for the Arts, the exhibition posits a nexus of art and social issues affecting Filipino children today. Child’s ART assembles a confluence of forms such as music, painting, literature, and media art, displaying each child’s idea and interpretation of "hybridity" in art.

Finally, Ateneo Art Gallery presents two exhibitions - Passion and Compassion: A Collector’s View and Interactive: 12 Human Senses which opens on November 21, 2007and November 26, 2007 respectively. The two exhibitions explore the intersections between art production and reception. Passion and Compassion specifically looks into the "interfaces between painting and philosophy, vision and discourse, imagination and thought" in the work of Lao Lianben, while Interactive drums up the possibilities of engagement between object and reader "in simultaneously cognitive and embodied experience" through an encounter with the works of Impy Pilapil (photo, right).

Zero In: Hybridity represents a spectrum of mandates, audiences, acquisitional and educational benchmarks.

Zero-In Exhibition dates
Ayala Museum
Hybridity: Mark Lewis Higgins
September 18 until October 28, 2007

Lopez Memorial Museum
Blur
October 25, 2007 until April 5, 2008

Bahay Tsinoy
Comida China
November 10 until January 31, 2008

Museo Pambata
Child’s ART (Advocacy, Rights and Thoughts) November 18, 2007 until January 17, 2008

Ateneo Art Gallery
Passion and Compassion
November 21 until February 15, 2007 and Interactive
November 26, 2007 until March 31, 2008

For more info, contact Fanny San Pedro at 631-2417 or visit www.zeroinmuseums.org