INTERACTIVE art, works depicting climate change, and various multimedia pieces made with artificial intelligence (AI) tools are on display at the exhibition of past winners of the Ateneo Art Awards for its 21st year. Slated to run until March 8, 2025, it is now on view at the Ateneo Art Gallery of the Ateneo De Manila University in Quezon City.

This year, the featured artists are Keb Cerda (2019 winner), Ronson Culibrina (2018 winner), KoloWn (2018 winner), and Christina Lopez (2021 winner). They each completed artist residencies following their wins.

“In alternate years, the return exhibition of past learners takes place; 2024 is the second time we’ve adopted this schedule,” Ateneo Art Gallery director and chief curator Boots Herrera said at the exhibit opening on Nov. 24.

She added that all four artists chosen for the show have pushed the envelope with their works, even after winning the award. “Media-based practice has offered visual artists wider options in artistic production,” she said.

Keb Cerda’s portion of the exhibit is a mini retrospective of recent games that he developed, starting with Super Nardo, the augmented reality (AR) game which earned him the Fernando Zobel Prize for Visual Arts. Following his residency at Liverpool Hope University in UK which was his Ateneo Art Award prize, he went on to make three more games: another AR game called Dahlia, the arcade machine Atomic Blob Machine, and an untitled kinect device game. All are playable at the exhibition.

Ronson Culibrina’s show Batangan, which refers to the slabs of wood or bamboo attached to a bangka (outrigger boat) to keep it balanced, is “a tribute to Talim Island in Laguna de Bay.” Being the artist’s hometown, it inspired the paintings and sculptures he made over the past few years. “All these works are grounded in my roots,” Mr. Culibrina told BusinessWorld at the opening.

KoloWn’s contribution to the exhibition is a work titled GhostWriter. It is a web application that creates fake stories based on current headlines from Philippine news websites and audience-submitted words via QR (Quick Response) code. Using the language model GPT-4, a sci-fi story is created from this data, which is projected on a large screen for gallery visitors to read.

“The work is a response to the proliferation of fake news and the possible impact of AI in our lives. The sources came from real time news headlines, and it is a critique on how fake narratives are created in the times of social media,” KoloWn said in a video played at the opening. The artist has not revealed their real name or face in public.

Meanwhile, Christina Lopez’s selection of works comes from some of her solo exhibitions. The most exciting one, reworked into a new form, is Sirens, a series of portraits displayed inside a cylindrical structure that one must step into, to be enveloped in total darkness save for a spotlight moving around to reveal the portraits one by one.

“Corresponding to those faces is audio that reacts to that, with the images as the trigger point,” Ms. Lopez explained. “My practice is about images, so I like to highlight that in my work.”

ART CRITICS AWARDEDThis year, the Ateneo Art Awards’ Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prizes in Art Criticism went to three writers: Levi Masuli, Chesca Santiago, and Ryan Cezar O. Alcarde. All three will be part of Orange Project’s month-long writer’s residency in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental.

Mr. Masuli’s essay, “All That Is Useful Lends Itself to Waste: Inside Jon Olarte’s Gyre Dominion,” tackled the said exhibition at MONO8 Gallery. Ms. Santiago, on the other hand, wrote “Against Community as Moral Currency,” which centered on Vien Valencia’s BAD LAND exhibit, mounted at Underground Gallery.  Mr. Alcarde’s winning essay in Filipino was “Line of sight: Ilang tanaw sa paggawa ng sining sa mga laylayan ng lunsod,” about Dennis Bato’s installation of the same name at the Baraks art space.

The winners will contribute to various publications for a year beginning in January: Mr. Masuli will write for The Philippine Star, Ms. Santiago will write for the ArtAsiaPacific magazine, and Mr. Alcarde for the Katipunan Journal.

“We perceive the world in fluctuation, where we try to find meaning and gain understanding as the ground seems to constantly shift beneath our feet. That’s how our founder, Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, saw the Philippine art scene, which she describes as a fluctuating, flexible, and wide-open field,” said Kalaw-Ledesma Foundation President Anna Marie Ozaeta at the awards.

“This year really reflects this, with the entries offering very different yet compelling approaches to this notion of fluctuation.”

The Ateneo Art Awards 2024 exhibition is on view at the third floor of the Ateneo Art Gallery in Arete, Ateneo de Manila University, Katipunan Ave., Quezon City, until March 8, 2025; the art criticism pieces may be read at https://pkl.ateneoartgallery.com. — Brontë H. Lacsamana