THE THEME for this year’s Museums and Galleries month is “Embracing Uncertainty: Showcasing Solidarity, Hope, and Recovery.” It accounts for the art community’s efforts to confront the structural and societal challenges they have faced even before the pandemic. In advancing this mission, artists are encouraged to embrace uncertainty—such as in spaces beyond museums and galleries. 98B COLLABoratory (98B) is an artist-run space and initiative that bears another way of navigating this path, probing what art does rather than what it can show us.
Artist-run spaces and the “alternative”
The term “artist-run space” sounds self-explanatory, but its meaning shifts when responding to the words “museums” and “galleries.”
From 1996 to 2006, artist-run spaces such as Pinaglabanan Gallery, The Junk Shop, Third Space, Surrounded By Water, Big Sky Mind, and Future Prospects provided “a much-needed arena for artists to produce and exhibit their work without the limitations of commercial galleries and traditional institutions.” In essence, they were spaces of experimentation and growth for artists—some of whom have come to play central roles in the trajectory of Philippine art.
By virtue of being different from traditional institutions, the artist-run space model has been labeled “alternative” by relevant discourse. On the one hand, this shows a deep understanding of how power operates within and through art. However, this is also a label that can perpetuate artist-run spaces’ otherness. Such tension is evident in this year's Museums and Galleries Month—more so, in the spaces’ minimal presence today.
Today, all six of the artist-run spaces mentioned earlier are no longer operational. Although they closed for different reasons—ones that the artist-run spaces in their lineage are not immune from—the pandemic has posed several challenges to their operations. Be that as it may, some spaces such as 98B continue to stand and thrive.
98B COLLABoratory
In January 2012, visual artist Mark Salvatus, along with curator and researcher Mayumi Hirano, established 98B in their Cubao studio and residence. By July of the same year, 98B found its present home in Escolta, Manila. The chosen site is a vital part of 98B’s programming—the street’s vibrant energy seeps into the heart of 98B’s collaborative spirit. It is located on the mezzanine floor of the First United Building, an Art Deco structure designed by the son of Filipino painter Juan Luna, Andres Luna de San Pedro. 98B’s website refers to their space as multi-functional: “It can serve as a studio, office, library, shop or kitchen.” In a way, their space simulates the diverse set of tenants in the building ranging from an architecture studio to an urban planner’s office.
Apart from art talks and project presentations, 98B’s programs engage in collaboration between artists, cultural workers, and other practitioners of the craft who develop more meaningful engagements with art. From the ESC Projects focused on engaging with spaces to the intimate conversations over food in 98B KITCHEN, the artist-run space touches on the necessity of discourse in arts and cultural growth. It is important to highlight that such efforts are approached in a welcome and open manner—one that values the voices of the “publics.” A term coined by art writers, “publics” refer not to a fixed group of people but different, unique sets of the public who gather around and interact with art programs.
This is what it means to be an artist-run space today—a place for reciprocative encounters between art and people. The pandemic has deftly affected the arts sector, especially non-profit spaces such as 98B. In particular, mounting funding challenges meant that commercial enterprises were inevitable. Their Future Market, in which creative workers sustain the space’s operation by selling their products, shifts the perspective on commercial goals from mere market response to cultural necessity. It asserts that art is inevitably a form of livelihood.
As it turned ten this year under director Katherine Nuñez, 98B has refined its past projects and ventured into new ones. Although the position of artist-run spaces in the Philippines remains unclear, there is hope in their resilience. For 98B, solidarity, hope, and recovery are not simply to be found in stories, but are active processes that require constant negotiation with the past, present, and future. They embody uncertainty as a nexus for growth, engendering a love for art and people that constitute a form of power not present in museums and galleries.