In celebration of Filipino American History Month, associate director Sara Raza moderates a lively panel discussion with contemporary practitioners Paul Pfeiffer (HB19), James Clar, and Ara Laylo(HB19). Their conversation will explore the role that Filipino diaspora artists play in introducing overt and covert visual strategies for creative resistance and in seeking to question ideas around societal and cultural perceptions, as depicted through various media.
Presented by Hawai‘i Contemporary with the Philippine Consulate General in Honolulu. This conversation is kindly supported, in part, by the Taiji and Naoko Terasaki Family Foundation.
About the Artists
Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu in 1966, and grew up traveling regularly between Hawai‘i and the Philippines. He moved to New York City in 1990, where he attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer’s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography revisits the history of popular mass entertainment to explore the role of images in shaping individual and collective consciousness. Reworking clips from YouTube, cable TV, and, increasingly, his own footage, Pfeiffer delves deeply into the aesthetics of nonlinear editing to elucidate the hybrid forms of space and time that define day-to-day experience in the contemporary world. For the Performa 19 Biennial, Pfeiffer presented his first live performance in collaboration with The Georgia Redcoat Marching Band from the University of Georgia at the Apollo Theater on November 11, 2019.
James Clar is a light and media artist. His work analyzes the effects of media and technology on our perception of culture, nationality, and identity. He studied film at NYU and received his master’s from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Clar’s practice focuses on new technological production processes and their application to artistic narrative forms. His work often deals with the perception of reality and the information systems that create it. For his last exhibition in New York, he filmed Japan’s top professional video game players in a movie, interviewing them and asking if their dreams occur in the video games they play, making their dreams take place in a virtual space. For an exhibition in London, he placed an EEG reader onto the central processor of a computer while it played a seamless loop of the movie eXistenZ, thereby recording the ‘brainwaves’ of a computer while it ‘thinks’ about a simulated reality.
Creative Consultant 