As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, Ayala Museum, with the gracious support of Wilcon Depot, proudly presents Dambana ng Kapwa: Indigenous Spirituality as Resistance from Colonialism, an exhibition featuring works by Nueva Ecija-based visual artist Joshua Limon Palisoc. It is part of the museum’s public art program, OpenSpace, which began in 2015.
This installation is a tapestry of animist, Hindu, Roman and folk Catholic spiritual symbols that highlights the interplay between foreign and indigenous cultures and creates a narrative of survival and resistance. Each sculpture is made of stainless-steel wire frames encasing light-emitting diodes. The open-work removes the wall between labas and loob, the object and the viewer.
The exhibition is grounded on the Filipino concept of kapwa, a state of shared existence and interconnectedness and treating another person as an extension of oneself. “This return to Filipino spirituality reclaims our deep-rooted cultural identity that fosters community, ecology, and authentic identity,” says Palisoc.
The installation is set up like a dambana, a sacred space where the spiritual and material worlds intersect. The oval shape of the dambana references the balangay, a water vessel associated to indigenous cosmology, trade and warfare. Small white stones surround the sculptures to emulate atang, traditional ritual rice offerings made to nature spirits and ancestors.
The artist acknowledges that, although his art is initially shaped by personal experience, his struggles and desires are shared by many Filipinos. Dambana ng Kapwa offers “a communal space for reflection, reclamation and healing.”
The dambana focuses on three major planes of existence—natural, social, and individual— each one represented by a pair of diwatas. The illumination is inspired from the ancient myth of Barangaw, the Visayan war god of the rainbow, and the Buddhist concept of chakra— specific areas of the body which are sources of psychic energies—by assigning each sculpture to a specific predominant color.
