ART FAIR PHILIPPINES

ArtFairPH/ Residencies is an artist residency program project of Art Fair Philippines in partnership with Bleeding Heart Rum Company, the makers of Don Papa Rum. Financial support will be awarded to five residency programs around the Philippines for the support of one artist in each residency.

About the Artist

Nicolei Buendia Gupit is a contemporary Filipina American artist working across installation, sculpture, painting, and video to probe questions on cultural belonging. Her multidisciplinary practice speculates on diasporic futures and entangles the relationship between ecologies, foods, histories, and cultures. Presently, she lives and works in the Philippines as a Fulbright Research Grantee pursuing transdisciplinary projects on the human toll of climate change in the Philippines.

Residency Experience

Nicolei Buendia Gupit was selected as one of the Art Fair Philippines Residencies grantees for this year. The grant invited her to participate in Linangan Art Residency, an eight-week-long immersive art-making experience in rural Alfonso, Cavite. During the residency, Gupit approached the opportunity to create new work in a Philippine context with an ecological mindset: Gupit’s work focused on the contradictions of water in the Philippines which she first observed in the lack of water pipes in her family’s household in Rosario, Cavite.

Her and her family’s experiences with limited access to water motivated her to develop artwork that expresses the irony between the inadequacy of potable water and the overabundance of water in the form of rain, flooding, and typhoons in the Philippines. Using her art background in casting and molding, she created We Carry What Carries Us, a sculptural series of hollow replicas of the ubiquitous blue “mineral water” jug. She made these objects with porous materials like plaster and paper so that they both literally and figuratively become containers incapable of holding water.

She also wove together video footage which she recorded throughout the residency of different sources of water in the Alfonso area, overlaid with oral narratives from members of the Lingangan community. This led to the experimental video she titled Submerged Stories Surface. She culminated her experience with the end-of-the-residency exhibition, Patikim, in which she showcased her finished video and installation pieces in a gallery space at Linangan.

At Art Fair Philippines 2023, she plans to bring attention to our relationship with bodies of water through new sculptural and mixed media works that use freshwater from local rivers, bays, and lakes as both material and inspiration.