CA+T "Reblogs" Queer Filipino Viral Hits!

Mini-Curated Exhibition Launches December 2 on Tumblr.

CA+T's mini-exhibition of "viral" Filipino digital productions illustrates how new media and digital outlets provide queer Filipinos and others new platforms for visibility and engagement.

The Center for Art and Thought (CA+T) announces a new mini-curated exhibition: CA+T "Reblogs" Queer Filipino Viral Hits. The online exhibition will begin December 2 and run through December 31, 2013 on CA+T's Tumblr page (centerforartandthought.tumblr.com).

CA+T "Reblogs" Queer Filipino Viral Hits showcases “viral” digital videos, images, and memes featuring "queer" Filipino bodies and moments. Broadly defining "queer," the exhibition includes non-heteronormative genders and sexualities in both Filipino and Western contexts (e.g., LGBTQ, bakla, tomboy) as well as performativity and aesthetics (e.g.,  "kitsch," "spectacle," and "camp") that challenge and go beyond how Filipino bodies, affects, and processes are conventionally understood. Viral Filipino digital productions like video of Filipino prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller and the videos and images of Filipino singer and Glee actress Charice’s “coming out” have drawn attention among Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike, garnering thousands of “views,” “likes,” and “reblogs” across platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Tumblr, respectively. CA+T "Reblogs" Queer Filipino Viral Hits revisits these “viral hits,” using Tumblr as a virtual exhibition platform that enables users to learn about how Filipino "queers" have been digitally represented and why these digital productions have become so popular.

This mini-online curated exhibition uses the Tumblr platform, particularly its "reblog" function, as a mode of education outreach. Each of the viral works in CA+T’s exhibition will include an annotation of the context from which the digital production emerged and "went viral." These annotations function like the captions that accompany art pieces in a museum. Those who are part of the Tumblr community will have the opportunity to “reblog” each of CA+T’s Tumblr posts to their own followers. This Tumblr curation will preserve each of the videos, images, and memes and their accompanying annotations for an exponential number of people, while also providing insight into the social and cultural processes that represent queer Filipino bodies and define their legibility in this new media and digital moment.

Along with CA+T's ongoing Queer Filipino Selfies project on Pinterest (www.pinterest.com/artandthought/queer-filipino-selfies), CA+T "Reblogs" Queer Filipino Viral Hits is one of a series of projects related to CA+T's upcoming cross-platform new media exhibition Queer Sites and Sounds, which will premier in January 2014 on CA+T's website (www.centerforartandthought.org). Queer Sites and Sounds will utilize CA+T's robust web presence to stage a virtual exhibition of creative and scholarly works, a new installation of CA+T's ongoing DIALOGUES series, original commissioned art, and an Artist-in-Residence.

CA+T hopes that this Tumblr exhibition, like the other projects in Queer Sites and Sounds, will illuminate how the queer Filipino bodies and moments online are central to the understanding of Filipino diasporic kinship and culture and also how these global online networks provide queer Filipinos and other social media users with new platforms for visibility, engagement, and critique.