Empire (ABS-CBN) comes from Dizon’s on-going cycle of works, Empire, in Fragments, which deal with the Philippines’ colonial and neo-colonial history in an era of globalization. The videos that comprise the installation include shots of the movie theater at the former US military bases, shots of the walls that enclose the former seat of Spanish colonial power, shots of recently built infrastructure by the US on the southern war-torn island of Mindanao, and shots of the media conglomerate ABS-CBN’s broadcast tower during a new year’s celebration. All of these fragments weave together a spatial and temporal experience of the question of empire as it continues in the global south in general and in the Philippines in particular. Empire (ABS-CBN) documents the Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN’s broadcast tower during a New Year’s celebration in 2009. The work recalls Warhol’s Empire in which Warhol filmed the Empire State building and slowed the film to a duration of eight hours. What is different in Dizon’s work is that the “empire” is not the name of the building, but rather, a political history in the context of the Philippine nation state and its colonial and neo-colonial history.

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, and scholar. Her work focuses on questions of postcoloniality, globalization, migration, social movements, human rights, and historical memory. She works between Los Angeles and Manila. Dizon has had solo exhibitions at the CUE Art Foundation in New York City, the Art Gallery at the University of Texas, Arlington, and the Vargas Museum in Manila, Philippines. Her work has been exhibited in group shows internationally including the Redcat Gallery (LA, CA), Galleryloop (Seoul, Korea), Kor-i-noor (Copenhagen, Denmark), Tate Modern (London, England), Para/site Art Space (Hong Kong, China), Luckman Gallery (LA, CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF, CA) , Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LA, CA), and the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA). She has taught in the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts and she is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Dizon holds a BA in English and History of Art from the University of California Berkeley and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is completing a Ph.D. in the Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley.

Curated by Jesse Aron Green