Arvin Nogueras, also known as Caliph8 (primarily associated with early Manila graffiti and hip-hop mutations) is born in 1977 at Manila, Philippines.

He sees his work as a continuum. Since the early 90s, his interest in various art forms has allowed him to cross and merge different disciplines. He uses an assortment of modes to realize his ideas into actual works or performances, always negotiating a multiplicity of relationships with the past, while inhabiting the present. His exploration of visual and sonic experiences has led him to develop a creative language that addresses ideas of merging sensibilities and creating hybrids, and their transformative implications. Overall, this approach emphasizes the multifaceted approach inherent to the experimentation process.

2000 BFA, University of the Philippines, Quezon City (RP)

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work explores the process and implications of fusion, addition and transformation, where I create a mutation or hybrid of certain phenomena from the past to the present. It is often provoked by the real contrast of different living conditions, cultural phenomena of the past and occult images of my subconscious. My job also involves certain health conditions that I suffer from, which have made me a hypochondriac.

I see my work as a miscegenation or amalgamation of these ideas, experiences and conditions.

My aesthetic attempts to merge an assortment of cultural sensibilities creating an unbalanced tension. I say this because I approach and shape these elements initially as someone with hip hop sensibilities that are quite indelible, which ignores certain cultural protocols or traditions. This quirky way of intertwining tangential ideas and cultural sensitivities makes the entire creative process subversive in its ways of juxtaposing, or even truncating, them into granular forms, causing an effect of blending and disorientation.

I have a proud history with the roots of graffiti and hip hop culture, but I also bite the hand that feeds me and cut off its head; graffiti sensibilities are strongly present in my work but in a sense they are also broken, malformed and dystopian in their state, destroying and rebuilding their essence, creating hybrid forms and ideas.

I’m interested in certain social phenomena, how people are in a state of herd mentality. Seeing most as victims and being like sheep versus celebrating a variety of culture and sensitivities, discerning and digesting them then taking a shit and then creating new things from that shit.

I am interested in exploring and manipulating sound, which I believe influences my visual aesthetics and vice versa.

A Rotten Pile of Temporary Realizations

OPENING:
Saturday, May 03, 2014, 6 p.m.

EXHIBITION DATA:
May 03 to June 27, 2014

1335MABINI presented Arvin Nogueras in a solo exhibition titled “A Rotten Pile of Temporary Realizations” from May 3 to June 27, 2014. Working with metropolitan waste infused with underground sensibilities, Arvin drew attention to urban objects with subversive tendencies. In total disregard of conventions, the artist left in his wake a mass of raw and crude works, abrasive to dominant artistic and cultural trends. Arvin draws inspiration from his background in graffiti and hip-hop, and undoubtedly subverts them with his material and audio manipulations. With this exhibition, Arvin highlighted the city streets and the subconscious, letting it ferment with its particularities to give the taste of the repulsive right under our noses.

Yassine Balbzioui, a versatile artist born in 1972 in Morocco, stands out for his innovative use of media and his challenge to conventions. During the 1990s, he took a variety of art courses and earned several degrees, including an MFA from the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca in Morocco, as well as a National Diploma of Art and a Higher National Diploma in Plastic Expression from the École des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux in France. In 2001 and 2002, he pursued training in arts and media at the University of Berkeley in California (USA) as part of the “education abroad program”.

Balbzioui is fascinated by the theme of the mask, which plays a central role in his work. He believes that society is often based on appearances. He says: “We increasingly live in a society that tries to hide its true nature behind lies. Everyone adopts a false identity.” His works constantly invite the viewer to question notions of sincerity and hypocrisy, or truth and lies.

The absence of a human face in Yassine’s work is striking; his paintings are populated with animals and birds, often referencing the bestiary, and depict stories or scenes based on the animals’ characteristics and their similarities to human behaviors and traits. “The animal is a creature that resembles us, but also where we find attributes that are increasingly absent in humans, such as gentleness or nobility,” says the artist. His works explore the idea of ​​“being” and “appearing” through the form of masks, and how our choices and actions are sometimes influenced more by primitive instincts than by considered decisions. With this technique, the oil paintings in his work feature chameleons, referencing how Indians learn to adapt to all situations.

His work develops around different axes: essentially a painter and designer, he develops, in a neo-expressionist vein, a production of great formal and semantic richness, in which the representation of human animality, most often under the covered with the mask, crosses the notions of derision, idiocy, grotesque, understood as artistic postures. In a distanced spirit, close to fluxus simplicity (although without formal connection with this movement), his theatrical work highlights in a radical and systematic way the “spirit of seriousness”, and strives, with a vitalism never denied and raw energy, mixing art and life.

If everyday life remains his main source of inspiration, a daily life constantly shifted under his unusual gaze, Yassine Balbzioui interferes with numerous worlds, those of cinema – Z series and horror films -, theater and dance, tales and legends…Everything is conducive to feeding one’s insatiable imagination. In perpetual research, he also develops work in various mediums: sculpture, ceramics, photographs, installations, video. Frequently putting himself on stage, he also deploys an important activity as a performer, in which we can observe the full extent of his madness!

Recently selected by Simon Njami for the 12th Dakar Biennial (Senegal), Yassine Balbzioui has, for fifteen years, exhibited his work all over the world: in France (Paris, and notably in 2014-2015 at the Institut du Monde Arabic for the panorama exhibition “Contemporary Morocco”, but also Bordeaux, Montluçon or Nantes), in Morocco (in the inaugural exhibition of the Mohammed VI Museum, in 2014, but also in Casablanca, Rabat, Essaouira), in Germany ( Bayreuth, Stuttgart, Berlin), the Netherlands (Amsterdam), Mexico, Italy (Cagliari, Sardinia, Milan) Spain, Bamako Mali. His career is punctuated by numerous artistic residencies in various creative venues abroad, including, recently, Trident Space in Hyderabad, India, and this year 2024 at Port Tonic Art Center.

His works have been included in several private and public collections, including that of the Bank Al-Maghrib Museum, in Rabat (Morocco) and the Alliances Foundation (Morocco).