Dates: Wednesday, 28 May 2025 to Sunday, 24 August 2025
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Design and Arts Campus (D+A Campus), Dominga Street, Malate, Manila
Moments of Delay questions the notions and conditions of contemporaneity. This exhibition and program draws from art critic Boris Groys, who wrote about the contemporary as “a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay”—a period constituted by doubt and hesitation. It means to live with uncertainty, as both a rupture and a pause, a turbulent condition of both longing for and existing in the past and future, while dealing with the anxieties of the present. Through this premise, we think through the contemporary moment as influenced by, and are manifestations of, both distant and recent pasts as well as projections and hopes into our futures.
Departing from Groys, Moments of Delay attempts to complicate our understanding of time and the contemporary moment. Today, in the Philippines, and much like elsewhere, we grapple with unpredictability in governance, environment, finances, and a conception of a liveable future. We seek to capture this uncertain time through various perspectives and artistic approaches, across a range of analog, current, and obsolete technologies. Between site-specific installations, generated imagery, sound, and painting, the artists in this exhibition and program speak to different facets of a contemporary world marked by doubt. These artists reference local concerns, addressing political calls and disinformation, together with poetic gestures alluding to public space, history, and the immaterial.
Moments of Delay examines contemporaneity through an exhibition that includes public programming as an integral component, bridging together material and immaterial expressions of artists, their work, practice, and concerns. Through a range of formats—exhibition-making, workshops, artist-led activities, and panel discussions—the artists in this program reveal different facets and strategies to comprehend our contemporary time and its delays.
A rarity in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila’s usual programming, this presentation builds upon the 2015 exhibition The Vexed Contemporary, which sought to complicate the positioning of art practices in local and global spaces that make up the art world. Moments of Delay proposes approaches to understanding time and the contemporary, addressing how artistic practice has been used as ways to probe individual and collective experiences, as reactions to specific conditions and speculations on a future, approaching “delay” as a fractured, yet expansive temporal state.
Moments of Delay brings together artists—Allan Balisi, Rocky Cajigan, Lesley-Anne Cao, Ronyel Compra, Uri de Ger, Celine Lee, Christina Lopez, Neo Maestro, Corinne de San Jose, Joar Songcuya, Tambisan sa Sining, Tropikalye, and Miguel Lorenzo Uy—to weed through the tensions and contradictions emerging from local contexts, looking inward yet with multiple trajectories responding to the fluidity of time, plural realities, and urgent concerns of the present.
Public Programs
Uri de Ger
Artist’s talk
Multimedia Room, MCAD
1 July, Tuesday, 3 PM
Uri de Ger’s practice is explored through a talk that examines how the reframing, reconstruction, and circulation of humor is mediated through approaches to art-making and media. By mimicking and referencing meme culture, de Ger unpacks contemporary anxieties in the age of the internet. Despite approaching humor through the lens of absurdist philosophies, de Ger avoids normalizing violence as he reflects on current issues and the senselessness of reality.
Joar Songcuya
Artist’s annotation
Hybrid: Online/MCAD/ILOMOCA
10 July, Thursday, 3 PM
In this program, Joar Songcuya walks viewers through selected pieces from the collection of the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art (ILOMOCA), discussing the affective and subjective experience these may communicate, informed by his experience as a former marine engineer. The vastness of the sea and its unfathomable depths have become a source of contemplation for artists, and Songcuya responds to particular works by contemporary artists who render their own visual expression of the sea.
Tropikalye
Indexing workshop
Multimedia Room, MCAD
19 July, Saturday, 2 PM
For Moments of Delay, Tropikalye will moderate an indexing workshop with high-school students and teenagers focused on the colors of their everyday environment. Through online materials, user-generated content, and input from participants, Tropikalye focuses on color to study the adaptation and transformation of material practice in the everyday. Central to this workshop is the process of indexing, used as an approach to categorizing colors associated with the cooling effect in the local context of a tropical country like the Philippines.
Celine Lee
Lecture-demonstration
Green Room, 10F, D+A Campus
9 August, Saturday, 3 PM
Through a lecture-demo, Lee revisits the viability and certainty of visual perception vis-a-vis other means of perceiving, and immersion in space, whether actual or virtual, in transporting viewers to a state of limbo and liminal space. The lecture-demo explores the concept of haptics in relation to the sensorial experience of art through the use of green screens (commonly used in filmmaking and photography) and mirrors. Illusion-making is a component of Lee’s practice, as she often distorts perception to reveal alternate possibilities in a make-believe environment.
Arianna Mercado & James Tana
Curators’ talk
Multimedia Room, MCAD
14 June, Saturday, 2 PM
Tambisan sa Sining
Educational discussion & workshop
Black Box, 10F, D+A Campus
21 June, Saturday, 2 PM
Miguel Lorenzo Uy
Artist’s talk
Multimedia Room, MCAD
26 June, Thursday, 3 PM
Lesley-Anne Cao
Artist’s annotation
Multimedia Room, MCAD
3 July, Thursday, 3 PM
Rocky Cajigan
Conversation with CSB-FDMP
Multimedia Room, MCAD
24 July, Thursday, 3 PM
Corinne de San Jose
Listening exercise
31 July, Thursday, 3 PM
Contemplation Room, Mezzanine, D+A Campus
Neo Maestro
Walking tour and storytelling
D+A Campus
22 August, Friday, 6 PM
