What is happening when red is simply red? In this case, at the very most, red is a rectangle of expanding luminous colour. I say ‘expanding’ so I must mean ‘arriving’; an arriving that is an appearing. An appearing that expands: red always becomes more, becomes dominant. But a video screen is not simply there, present; it has to keep filling itself from somewhere or it disappears. It is not like rain from the sky. It is not even “her rain,” the artist’s rain. Its arriving is more like a flow that we know can stop. After all, it’s electronic: off / on—or as the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett wrote, “off, it goes on.” What a crazy play with a few simple words. How can an artist say so much with so little? It goes on. This sounds a bit like helplessness in the face of catastrophe: something goes on and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, to make it go off. Of course, red means many things: to stop, to go off, danger and urgency, a warning, a shot of colour. If a shot were to have colour, then it can only be that of red; but, red is also the most sensual of all colours. Perhaps even at some level, red is the colour of art, the urgency of its being made, coming into appearance, a separating from whatever is merely ongoing. Maestro’s red screen is intermittently interrupted by a play of sounds in Tagalog—ha / lak / hak—pop up in an apparent disorder on the screen.

Although not as succinct as Beckett and long before television or video, the Prague author Franz Kafka also understood something about machines and how things sometimes seem to just go on. It’s a space of ongoing, of regulation, of automation, and of sleep. In The Penal Colony he wrote, “Now just have a look at this machine. Up till now a few things still had to be set by hand, but from this moment it all works by itself… It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus.”

And so, a wall is sometimes a screen. In this case, it is one that supports not only a building, but also a word / image. Perhaps it is even a mirror through which we can see: a visual echo, where the echo is that of a street with people looking through a glass wall. Again the wall—and this picks up something from a work Maestro created about twenty years ago. There, she used what has been called “the revolutionary power of women's laughter” with actual recorded laughter floating out of windows in a giant, minimal white cube. But you see how it looks on the page: women… s'laughter.

Watching a video screen invites or compels listening, but listening to what? In technical terms, we would say that what we are listening to is the electronic signal. Certainly, red must be some kind of signal, though it’s more like the signal of a command. But is it to stop, or to go? It is completely ambiguous—we have to choose even when it's risky. Red is the colour of the pain in Maestro’s neon ‘wall sculptures’ that spell out “NO PAIN LIKE THIS BODY” and the reverse, “NO BODY LIKE THIS PAIN.” The first phrase is adopted from a book of the same title by the Trinidadian-Canadian author Harold Sonny Ladoo, who was murdered on the street. In a sense, this exhibition honours all other victims of violence. Ladoo was noted for his novels which play between several languages as a celebration of all those who have nothing. Language, especially when written, has always been important in Maestro’s art as they were for the late Korean artist Theresa Cha. Another murdered artist, her videos and installation works have been an inspiration for Maestro. The New York performer, spoken word poet, and visual writer John Giorno has also had an impact on Maestro. Perhaps this recalls something from the popularity of spoken word poetry amongst Filipinos—there is commemoration in these words, as words remember everything. But there is also warning: words are always one foot into the future.

This is not the first time artist Lani Maestro has used video in her work. She has typically adopted it to the more pacific themes of water and sleep, both of which carry the resonance of flow, flows of nature, the cosmos, one’s body, movements of persons across oceans. In her case, this would be the movement of frequent crossings between Manila, Canada, France—and now with this exhibition, her traveling to Venice, Italy where she will participate as one of the two official Philippines representatives (with Manuel Ocampo) at the 57th Venice Biennale.

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