Contrapuntals

About this event

September 25, 2026 - September 26, 2026 From ICOSA Collective: "Contrapuntals takes its title from music, where two or more independent melodic lines unfold simultaneously. Rather than merging into a single voice, each retains its own integrity, creating moments of harmony, tension, and dissonance. The exhibition adopts this structure as a way of thinking about the conversation between the work of Intel Lastierre and Vy Ngo. Each artist approaches questions of history, power, and identity from a distinct perspective, generating meaning through proximity and difference. Rather than seeking resolution, Contrapuntals asks what becomes possible when distinct voices remain in conversation. Lastierre's paintings draw viewers into fluid, flesh-like forms that hover between body and landscape, where layered surfaces and shifting contours evoke histories that resist fixed boundaries. Through these visceral compositions, she examines colonialism as an ongoing structure that continues to shape the modern world, with a particular focus on the Philippines and the United States. Her work gives material form to histories of violence, transformation, and survival while tracing how imperial systems informed ideas of democracy, progress, knowledge, and human value, producing enduring inequalities of power and belonging. Moving through histories of conquest, labor, language, technology, and representation, she reveals how practices of classification, extraction, and control persist within contemporary institutions. At the same time, her paintings recover suppressed histories and cultural memory, foregrounding resistance, resilience, and the possibility of imagining beyond inherited systems of power. Ngo's work likewise begins with close observation. Emerging from a recent journey through central Vietnam, her paintings and installations draw on fragments of architecture, historical imagery, and found materials to examine how successive occupations continue to shape the country's…