France’s largest museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art held an exhibition called "City Prince/sses" last summer featuring 50 artists working from the creative landscapes of five megacities: Dhaka, Lagos, Manila, Mexico, and Tehran
Finished in 1937, Palais de Tokyo calls itself an anti-museum that seeks to challenge concepts of what art can be in Paris, a city known for its canonical works of fine art. For City Prince/sses, Palais de Tokyo was transformed from a sprawling space of exposed beams and raw aged material into an unpredictable, eclectic, dizzying labyrinth mapped by the scenographer, Olivier Goethals. No geographical markers distinguished one area from another. Artists of various disciplines and forms of expression—from tattoo artists to musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists—were asked to picture themselves as a prince or princess ruling a city free of constraint, fear, or taboo.
More than a year in the making, the curators Hugo Vitrani and Fabien Danesi chose the cities based on their underground art spaces. From the Philippine contingent came a wide range of art forms that drew raves from those who attended the exhibition. There was fashion, performance art, animation, mural, paintings, and film. Some of the Filipino artists would meet each other there for the first time. Hanging high at the entrance of the Palais, David Griggs, an Australian living in the Philippines, set the tone of the exhibition with Manila Strange #1 and Manila Strange #2. Two banners painted with acrylic on canvas sheet showed zombies, bunnies, and men and women with balloons on a checkered background as if characters caught inside a psychedelic video game. The artist known as Doktor Karayom distinguished for his use of mercury red acrylic paint and playful morbid illustrations meanwhile showed Isla Inip. A giant-sized Jose Rizal lay in the middle of the installation as if pinned to the ground by an army of small red figurines. In a film composed of 294 drawings, Dex Fernandez showed black and white animated illustrations of a Garaparty as it mutated and changed shape from one image to another.
