Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

For years now, Joven Mansit has been creating a body of work that deconstructs old Filipiniana photographs by introducing wildly divergent and incongruous elements. Still in sepia, the works all of sudden generate an alarming, almost sinister, quality, disrupting the expectation of the viewer in finding “truth” in photographic documentation, albeit translated into paintings. In this work, Class Picture, 1914, Mansit transforms a common subject into some kind of a memento mori. A coffin, capped with a skull, sits front and center. The teacher presides over it with a halo. Save for a few, the students either bear food or torches, or have been transformed into body parts or technological apparatuses. What is usually a sedate occurrence (sitting for a class picture) becomes a cacophony of odors and sounds. It becomes all the more disconcerting because of the presence of the dead that is supposed to revered. Mansit, in incorporating these details, “resurrects” the photograph from history and delivers an oblique, though no less unstinting, critique on how once solemn events, such as funerals, have become festive.