Joshua Serafin is a multidisciplinary artist born in Bacolod, Philippines. The lull summoned in VOID (2022–ongoing) is not emptiness but an interval premised on the possible, fulfilled through a nonbinary godhead imagining a newfangled world and ushering it into being by creating themself through gesture, expressivity, and movement. VOID’s tropical futurist vision of the brown body in primordial space breaches imperial patriarchy’s notions of not only power and beauty but also of existence and experience itself. Drawn from myths recounting the creation of the Philippine archipelago through queer + trans performance, VOID envisions a future that conjures embodiments of a nonbinary species of the gender-diverse realm. This vision is prefigured by a nonbinary god who dances their way into an ever-changing space. On the cusp of erasure and écriture, Serafin presents an allegory of absence to propose resonances of a certain re-presence. The void is that generative moment where being is transfigured as élan vital of the becoming-open, a paradox only willingly embraced by the queerly post-human yet also humanly trans-divine.
This is the first time the work of Joshua Serafin is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Jaya Jacobo
