Philippines Dedicates Sculptors Stage In Its Expo 2020 Pavilion

DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 29th Mar, 2021) Sculptors Duddley Diaz and Dan Raralio, and multi-media artists Toym Imao and Riel Jaramillo Hilario are four of the dozen Filipino artists who were commissioned by the Philippines Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) for the Expo 2020 Dubai.

These artists will collectively present a cosmopolitan profile of the Philippines at the country’s pavilion at the Expo.

Employing their individual artistic languages, these artists will provide the Philippines’ Pavilion with a sequence of visual and physical experiences that draw on both updated scientific data and the mythological imagination of the Filipino.

Instead of reusing folk art concepts, they confidently wield their fluency in Modern and Contemporary Art idioms to inspire fresh insight into the Philippine experience. Their collective vigor is expected to drive the pavilion’s intent of showing to the world a Philippines where art, science, and powerful imaginativeness prevail despite the odds.

Considerable interest pulls them in the direction of mythology for the future.

Duddley Diaz’ immense, blue, and confrontingly pregnant figure of the mythic Haliya, positioned to hugely mark the pavilion entrance plaza sets the tone for experiencing myth as simultaneously ancient and a projection to the deep future.

Diaz’ well-known virtuosity with expressive massing is used in the pavilion to communicate a major message: confidence in Philippine culture, in the context of the Expo District on Sustainability.

Suspended nearby in the same entrance plaza, Dan Raralio’s "Mystiquecross" is an ambiguous fish-like figure taking form as an amalgam of old-tech shapes, made oddly older by the verdigris finish. The Raralio machinic fish carries aloft the theme Diaz begins for the pavilion the activations of the mythic imagination to speak to the future confidently bringing together the ideas of metallic weight and animal buoyancy.

The themes of mythic flight and creatures of the mind also end the pavilion experience. Toym Imao’s sculpture of an explosion of bird forms is located at the topmost level of an extended outdoor ramp wrapped around the pavilion core. Visitors will enter a space marked by columns; its "roof" are birds in flight. "Confluence of Wings" resurrects birds in Philippine mythology as symbol of elevated states of being.

The Expo 2020 Dubai is an opportunity for the Philippines to present, on the world stage, a surprising, complex, and stirring self-portrait of a national community.