Mac Andre Arboleda‘s second solo exhibit “The Face of a Marcos Apologist” opens on July 21, 2018, Saturday, 6:00 p.m. at Nomina Nuda, Los Baños, Laguna. The project, first released as a black-and-white zine under Asshulz, now presents itself in an exhibition setting with music by 帰宅します, Amado.

About The Face of a Marcos Apologist

Selfies compatible to facial recognition system have been fed to an online portrait morphing software, resulting in the composite image the project calls “the average face of a Marcos apologist.” Mac Andre Arboleda selects data and puts them together in a singular space, allowing the viewer to pay closer attention to what would otherwise have been internet debris, and the smartphone self-portraits that have become the symbol of millennial narcissism and construction of personas on social media are transformed into artifacts of a moment in internet history: Publicity Asia’s 2016 Twitter contest #WinADateWithSandro that promised 12 best selfie submissions a date with the grandson of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

The artist’s ‘curation’ through found images is an insistence on memorializing what is absent here, the unmemorialized. We are asked to suffer the pouting faces and casual poses and mull over their number and namelessness. The deluge of these ephemeral but persistent selfies instigated by a campaign to erase Marcos atrocities from public memory underscore the irony in view of the over 1600 individuals that were disappeared during the Marcos regime: the immediate face, an unwitting trace of the vanished one.