Judy Freya Sibayan

I. Critically Performing Criticality

In January 1977, Judy Freya Sibayan, aged 23, participated in the Philippines’ first declared work of performance art. She and two other artists—Ray Albano, the acting director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), and Huge Bartolome, with whom Sibayan had studied art at the University of the Philippines—collaborated on a 15-minute event titled Three Pieces: A Performance, which was held in the End Room of the Main Gallery in the CCP, where Sibayan was also working as a curatorial assistant at the time. Sibayan stood with her back to the audience in the center of a one-meter-square area marked by electrical tape on the floor, and read a poem-like script about performance art written by Albano, while Bartolome performed three actions, each for five minutes: first stepping on a designated number of floor tiles; then weaving around a post and a chair; and finally, walking around Sibayan. “Just as a painter is painting with paint and brush he may also choose other means and materials to paint with. Such as paper cray-pas…day-to-day objects. Junk. He may make his work move. He may use smoke, sand, the wind. He may use time. Time is a can of paint, time is a brush,” Sibayan narrated. Simultaneously a demonstration and a critical reflection, the first act of performance art in the Philippines was, in essence, a meta-performance.

This reflective, and reflexive, approach to art-making has been Sibayan’s hallmark throughout a practice that now spans more than four decades. As her conceptual practice deepened her critique of art-making and art institutions, Sibayan transformed herself from an artist and curator working, as she writes, “at the center/Center”—in reference to the CCP—of the Philippines cultural establishment to its periphery, where she learned to inhabit the role of an “ex-centric,” a term that she (1988) to indicate the insider-outsider position that she still occupies today.