Postcolonial Sufferance

Abstract

The paper regards Philippine contemporary art as a body of work that suffers. Conversing across the disciplines of art criticism, history, aesthetics, and anthropology, it discusses certain tropes in a current artistic tradition that reference suffering as an articulation of ideological strategy in the broader context of post-colonial history and its struggling body politic. Suffering here is re-motivated as a force or energy for prevailing amid the constraints and chances of the current world; it is reconverted from a colonial aesthetic into a redemptive transfiguration of a possible post-colonial future for the Philippines.