SYNTHETIC CONDITION: Curated by Carlos Quijon Jr. at UP Vargas Museum
Past exhibition
Overview
"Synthetic Condition" offers itineraries in thinking about how contemporary art creates its own cosmologies through technologies, technics, and procedures of synthetics. Synthetics assumes a relay of conceptual tenors within this framework. In philosophy, a synthetic statement’s truth implicates the conditions of the world. Whereas in analytic statements, truth can be gleaned from a statement itself, synthetic statements require one to situate knowledges in relation to or against the world. In other fields, to be synthetic is to exceed organic materials and natural processes. In this exhibition, synthetics embraces a range of articulations: chroma key, collages and composites, metahistorical film, a video game, homegrown crystals, textile sculptures that cocoon personal memory.
How can we imagine artistic form and practice as synthetic improvisations that disclose their own cosmological imagination? The forms, processes, and materials that find themselves in the exhibition inform how we situate ourselves in relation to worlds—whether real, virtual, historical, speculative. In this relay, the cosmological imagination—how worlds are constituted and how they signify—is dislodged from pre-existent, pre-formed, and natural discourses that have long structured its conceptualization and, through contemporary art, is recast as plastic, formative, and constitutive—a synthetic condition.
How can we imagine artistic form and practice as synthetic improvisations that disclose their own cosmological imagination? The forms, processes, and materials that find themselves in the exhibition inform how we situate ourselves in relation to worlds—whether real, virtual, historical, speculative. In this relay, the cosmological imagination—how worlds are constituted and how they signify—is dislodged from pre-existent, pre-formed, and natural discourses that have long structured its conceptualization and, through contemporary art, is recast as plastic, formative, and constitutive—a synthetic condition.
