‘Lies, Magicians and Blind Faith’ reflects a dynamic period of exchange between Australian and Filipino artists in the 1990s and 2000s. The changing political environment of the mid-1980s saw a surge in artist-organised activity across the Philippines. Concerned with social contradictions and colonial legacies, artists became interested in expressions from the archipelago’s diverse cultural communities, and began incorporating folk motifs and indigenous materials into their experiments with two- and three-dimensional forms.

The Visayan island of Negros, one of the central Philippine Islands, was home to the politically active group Black Artists of Asia, which included former political detainee Nunelucio Alvarado, and initiated the long-running artist-run biennale VIVA ExCon in 1990. In the Cordillera region in the country’s north, Santiago Bose and others co-founded the Baguio Arts Guild in 1987 and the Baguio International Arts Festival in 1989, creating a major platform for progressive artists from the Philippines and beyond.

Shifts in diplomatic, trade and cultural policy around this time created opportunities for Australian artists to engage more closely with their peers in the Asia Pacific region. Initiatives such as Perth’s Artist Regional Exchange (ARX), which ran from 1987 to 1999, and Asialink, founded in 1990, enabled close contact between Australian and Filipino artists, proving vital to the development of the first Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1993.

Named for an artist book produced by Bose, ‘Lies, Magicians and Blind Faith’ features rich and vivid experiments in painting, installation, and works on paper that share a scepticism toward belief systems and political structures, while demonstrating the expansive possibilities of artist-to-artist dialogue within the Asia Pacific region.

Feature image: David Griggs’s Frog boy's dissertation into a new karaoke cult 2008, installed for ‘Lies, Magicians and Blind Faith’, March 2023 / Purchased 2008 with funds from the Queensland Government's Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund and with the assistance of the Melbourne Art Fair Foundation / © Courtesy of the artist, Jan Murphy Gallery Brisbane and Station Gallery Melbourne / Photograph: N Harth, QAGOMA