Many have designed an art show concept for the election season with outright political directions, albeit some only going as subtly as to dedicate their efforts to, say, only a color being used by a political alliance. Meanwhile, some curations generally ignored the time’s noise.
Anyway, back in early October 2021 before candidates registered their names, Raul Arellano talked to Jojo Soria de Veyra and Nestor Vinluan about putting up a show that would seem to do something like the latter, although nature and the concept of the “paradise” can hardly be claimed as apolitical. So, what resulted from the conversation was a show concept that would tackle an “only subtly political or social” concept phrase, but would ultimately demonstrate that every engagement with a linguistic idea would already comprise an artist’s individual social or political culture.
Thus, here, almost as if they were in a political debate, the 16 artists invited to the show were allowed to freely react to the phrase-stimulus “earthly paradise” (which could be a synonym for happiness). What’s in the show now here, therefore, can’t be read as a collection of treatments of a single definition of that phrase as imposed by the curators. Instead, what’s here is a palette of approaches to the concept-phrase that would range from the biblical to the mythological, cultural, psychological, and more obviously political, in moods that would either be serious or ironic (parodying or satiric) or celebratory or worried, from sensibilities that would range from the mystical to the quasi-libertine to the sociologically or politically involved.

— Jojo Soria de Veyra