Past Exhibition

“Superwoman: Empire of Care (2021), adopts K-pop's costumes and choreography to criticise the living conditions of Filipino migrants and medical and essential workers during the pandemic in the Philippines. Movements in the video constantly cut off abruptly, and the lyrics of Karyn White's 1989 pop song 'Superwoman' are reworked with a mash-up of Blackpink's 2019 single 'Kill This Love'. While the costumes are constantly changing from K-pop style to medical workers' protective clothing, Jocson and two band members Bunny Cadag and Cathrine Go sing lyrics like: 'Modern-day heroes, superheroes are what you call us. But when we cry for help you pretend that you don't hear us...' Superwoman, Empire Of Care a video work won the 2021 SeMa-HANA Award at the Seoul Media City Biennale.

Eisa Jocson’s latest project, the performance-video Pasyoke (derived from Spanish Pasqua for Easter and Karaoke) by The Filipina Superwoman Band, which unravels as an expansion of her body of work around notions of the Filipino singing culture as a state-supported export, mimicry in the music industry, and Snow White and Superwoman as archetypes. The band is an all-female musical ensemble responding to the "Overseas Filipino Musician" (OFM) phenomenon in clubs, bars, hotels and cruise boats throughout Asia and the Middle East. A cross between contemporary dance and music video, Pasyoke merges genres, combining Pasyón, a 16th-century epic Biblical narration of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, with Bidyoke - karaoke gatherings customary in the Philippines for celebrations. The project was conceived as a research project that would have seen Eisa Jocson spending time as an artist-in-residence in Dubai. These plans were thwarted by the pandemic and the little research that was still possible was done remotely, while the production took place mostly in the Philippines instead of the UAE.

In Princess Parade, Eisa Jocson brings her choreographed scenes to the streets of Manila. The video features agroup of Filipino dancers clad in Snow White outfits parading the streets, performing their brand of ‘happiness’ to an unsuspecting public. The flamboyance of their outfits stand in stark contrast to their casual environment and provide an unexpected intervention into normality. Along thepath they confront the external hegemonic controls that have gripped the Filipino social and political landscape in the 20th and 21st century, without letting their plastic smiles slip from their faces as they do so. The group of Snow Whites are composed of Jocson andher team of female and male dancers, who express gender fluidity through their feminine gestures in a way that evokes Jocson’s earlier gender-bending work in Macho Dancing.

Super Woman KTV is a karaoke video combining song & dance performances inspired by folk rituals, oral traditions, and contemporary pop songs. Through studying the different emotional registers and cultural meanings of popular songs in the Filipino culture, Jocson uses them to build a growing archive of key extracts, phrases and dance routines. For the artist, they represent collective notions of femininity for different generations in the Philippines. As an ongoing project, Jocson uses this archive to ambitiously map out a contemporary adaptation of the ancient “epic” tradition, in an attempt to preserve the memory of such epics. Through song and dance performances influenced by rituals pre-dating the colonial era, Jocson channels the spirituality of this collective ritual into a trajectory that is connected with feminine empowerment in the contemporary era.

In the video, Eisa Jocson presents The Filipino Superwoman Band, an ensemble who perform a choreographed routine to the song ‘Superwoman’. The song, originally sung by an American singer Karyn White, became a hit when the Filipino singer Janine Desidario re-released it with a new title ‘Hindi Ako si Darna (I am not a superwoman),’ telling the story of female affective labor and reflecting the struggles of Filipino migrant workers. Jogging the memory of the KTV phenomenon, the choreography of the female performers unpacks the song’s discussion of women and their affective labor in modular and adaptive aesthetic movements.