Stephanie Misa & Joscha Steffens: Oculus

In the organizer's words:

"Seeing things" is a tricky phrase. It may mean grasping objects visually as evidence that they are really in the world. But it may also mean sensing phenomena that are not of this world. The exhibition Oculus delicately moves around this enigmatic instance of seeing things, and it takes the artists Stephanie Misa and Joscha Steffens to historical situations that at once clarify and confound the moment of vision. What things do we see? Is it only things that we see? With the careful mediation of fact through the instruments of science and the sensitive appreciation of fiction through the speculations of art, the exhibition tries to dissipate the binary limit of fact and fiction to anticipate what may well be a third material condition of reflection and action.

The locus of this process is Heidelberg, where the Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal studied ophthalmology in 1886 at the Universitäts-Augenklinik and assisted the clinic's director, Dr. Otto Becker, in several eye surgeries. At that time, the augenspiegel (ophthalmoscope) was a new device that enabled the physician to see the interior of a living eye. It was also in this city that Rizal wrote parts of his novel Noli Me Tangere (1887), which partly ignited the Philippine revolution against Spain. He stayed with the politically progressive Pastor Karl Ulmer in Wilhemsfeld, a town close to Heidelberg.

These two initiations coming together through visions and investigations, specifically through the aperture and threshold of Rizal, speak to the framework of the Philippine presence as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2025. Taken from the chapter on Sisa in Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, the phrase "the imagination peoples the air" shapes the ethos and theory of such a presence. It evokes the intuitions that make writing and reading possible and surround both the historical atmosphere and the ecology of the species and spirits.

STEPHANIE MISA is a visual artist and researcher whose work centers on decolonizing methodologies. Her artistic practice connects multicultural collaboration, curating, and feminist criticism. In her work, Misa examines phenomena related to the orality and richness of multilingualism.
She has shown works at the VBKǑ in Vienna (2024), Vienna Secession (2023), Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt (2023), RMIT Gallery, Melbourne (2023), Depo Istanbul (2023), KODA/RU House Governor's Island, NYC (2022), The KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021), the 9th Bucharest Biennale (2021) to name a few, and was awarded the Art Merita Prize for Artistic Research in 2021.
She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and a master's from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. She is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Arts in Helsinki and working on projects funded by the Kone Foundation and SKR (Finnish Cultural Foundation). She lives and works in Vienna and lectures at the Department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she leads a Philippine Research Program, the Island Tides Intiative, supported by the Office of the Senator Loren Legarda and the Embassy of the Philippines in Austria.

JOSCHA STEFFENS creates work about - and within - hidden communities that immerse themselves in an imaginary world. He focuses primarily on the game world - both virtual and live action - and its concepts of creating the avatar-self. Working across photography, video installation, games and film, his focus is on formats that require participants to transcend the boundaries of play, touching on a devotional level of gaming culture, its rituals and meanings within religious movements.
Joscha graduated from Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) in Leipzig and completed the post graduate program of Kunsthochschule für Medien (KHM) in Cologne. He was Artist in Residence at Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and appointed AIR Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Research Group of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS/KNAW). Since 2020 he is functioning as organizer and moderator of the art & science gameshow format Talking Heads in Heidelberg.
He was awarded with Wüstenrot Foundation Award for Documentary Photography (2017), Großer Kunstpreis Köln (2016), Mannheimer Kunstpreis of Heinrich-Vetter-Foundation (2020), among others. His works in public and private collections include: Fotografische Sammlung Folkwang Museum Essen, DZ Bank Art Collection, Art Collection of the European Central Bank, Huis Marseille - Museum voor Fotografie, Collectie Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, Art Collection City of Heidelberg and the HSG Collection Sankt Gallen.

PATRICK FLORES is Chief Curator of National Gallery Singapore. He is concurrently Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network.
He has written significantly on Southeast Asian art, specifically its colonial and modernist formations, and has curated contemporary exhibitions on and through Southeast Asia. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014.
Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017); and The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2023), which he co-edited with T. K. Sabapathy. He was a Curator (Position Papers) at the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019 and Curator of the Philippine Pavilion in 2015 and the Taiwan exhibition in 2022 at the Venice Biennale.