she laughs, installation with video,gallery furniture, twomonitors, wall text,2010/2017. “her rain”(slaughter): Lani Maestro 11 February – 12 March 2017 Left: No Pain Like This Body, installation with ruby red neon, 140 x 61 cm, 2010. View of Centre A window facade on Hastings Street, Vancouver. Photo: Hua Jin Below: No Pain Like This Body, installation with ruby red neon, 140 x 61 cm, 2010. Shown at Centre A for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver. Photo: Hua Jin What is happening when red is simply red? In this case, at the very most, red And so, a wall is sometimes a screen. In this case, it is one that supports there is commemoration in these words, as words remember everything. But is a rectangle of expanding luminous colour. I say “expanding” so I must mean not only a building, but also a word/image. Perhaps it is even a mirror through there is also warning: words are always one foot into the future. “arriving;” an arriving that is an appearing. An appearing that expands: red which we can see, a visual echo, where the echo is that of a street with people This is not the first time artist Lani Maestro has used video in her work. She always becomes more, becomes dominant. But a video screen is not simply looking through a glass wall. Again the wall, and this picks up something from has typically adopted it to the more pacific themes of water and sleep, both there, present; it has to keep filling itself from somewhere, or it disappears. a work Maestro created about twenty years ago. There, she used what has of which carry the resonance of flow, flows of nature, the cosmos, one’s body, MO_Space It is not like rain from the sky, it is not even “her rain,” the artist’s rain. Its been called “the revolutionary power of women’s laughter” with actual recorded movements of persons across oceans. In her case, this would be the movement arriving is more like a flow that we know can stop, after all, it’s electronic:off/ laughter floating out of windows in a giant, minimal white cube. But you see of frequent crossings between the Philippines, Canada, France—and now with Subject on—or as the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett wrote, “off, it goes on.” how it looks on the page: women…s’laughter. this exhibition, her traveling to Venice, Italy where she and Manuel Ocampo will The activation of artistic What a crazy play with a few simple words. How can an artist say so much Watching a video screen invites or compels listening, but listening for what? participate as the two official Philippine representatives at the 57th Venice Biennale. ideas both current and with so little? “It goes on,” this sounds a bit like helplessness in the face of In technical terms, we would say that what we are listening to is the electronic crosscurrent to our times. catastrophe: something goes on and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, to signal. Certainly red must be some kind of signal, though it’s more like the sig- Stephen Horne make it “go off.” Of course, red means many things: to stop, to go off, danger nal of a command. But is it to stop, or to go? It is completely ambiguous—we Medium and urgency, a warning, a shot of colour. If a shot were to have colour, then have to choose even when its risky. Red is the colour of the pain in Maestro’s Visual dialogue and critical it can only be that of red; but, red is also the most sensual of all colours. neon wall sculptures that spell out “No Pain Like This Body,” and the reverse, The artist would like to thank the correspondence; open-ended Perhaps even at some level, red is the colour of art, the urgency of its being “No Body Like This Pain.” The first phrase is adopted from a book of the same Canada Council for the Arts, questions, nagging instincts, made, coming into appearance, a separating from whatever is merely ongoing. title by the Trinidad-Canadian author Harold Sonny Ladoo, who was murdered MO_Space, and Neo Maestro. Maestro’s red screen is intermittently interrupted by a play of sounds in Tagalog— on the street. In a sense, this exhibition honours all other victims of violence. introspective musings, or forceful ha / lak / hak—pop up in an apparent disorder on the screen. Ladoo was noted for his novels which play between several languages, as a assertions—all consistently Although not as succinct as Beckett and long before television or video, celebration of all those who have nothing. Language, especially when written, guided by the power of the the Prague author Franz Kafka also understood something about machines and has always been important in Maestro’s art, as they were for the late Korean artist artworks themselves. how things sometimes seem to just “go on.” It’s a space of the “ongoing,” of Theresa Cha. Another murdered artist, her videos and installation works have regulation, of automation, and of sleep. In The Penal Colony he wrote, “Now just been an inspiration for Maestro. The New York performer, spoken word poet, 3rd level, MOs Design, B2 Bonifacio High Street, 9th Avenue, Bonifacio Global Dimensions have a look at this machine. Up till now a few things still had to be set by hand, and visual writer John Giorno has also had an impact on Maestro. Perhaps this City, Fort Taguig Phone 856 2748 ext 2. Open daily 11 AM – 8 PM. The reach, depth, and range of but from this moment it all works by itself… It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus.” recalls something from the popularity of spoken word poetry amongst Filipinos— Visit us online at www.mo-space.net contemporary expression..