UP exhibits artworks, offers subjects on martial law

The University of the Philippines (UP) has opened an exhibit of artworks sequestered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) following the fall of the dictatorship in 1986.

The PCGG Artworks Collection: Objects of Study was opened for public viewing by prior appointment at the UP Vargas Museum in Diliman, Quezon City starting on Tuesday.

The exhibit consists of works from Italy, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia that were sequestered by the PCGG from a trove of pieces traced to the family of the late president Ferdinand Marcos.

Created by the late former president Corazon Aquino in 1986, the PCGG is the government agency tasked to recover the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family and their cronies.

Among those sequestered by the PCGG were jewelry and art works bought using public funds, including those found at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila conceived by former first lady Imelda Marcos.

“Since then, a number of paintings, including the ones by Botticelli, Raphael and Titian, had been disposed of by the PCGG through auction, the proceeds going towards agrarian reform. But some pieces remained,” said the UP Vargas Museum.

President Marcos has yet to issue a directive regarding the future of the PCGG.

Meanwhile, UP Diliman will also offer several subjects about martial law in the upcoming school year.

The UP Film Institute said it will offer four courses on martial law and the cinema, which will be open to all UP Diliman students.

Among these courses are “Semiotics of Martial Law and Cinema,” to be taught by professor Nick Deocampo; “Horrors!” by professor Ed Cabagnot; and “Martial Law and Pinoy Cinema, Noon at Ngayon,” to be handled by professor Sari Dalena.

Former UP College of Mass Communication dean Roland Tolentino will teach a seminar course on “Cinema, Martial Law and Historical Revisionism.”

The UP Journalism Department will also offer a subject for journalism majors on “Martial Law and the Press,” to be taught by professor Ma. Diosa Labiste.

“The course will discuss the experience of media under the Marcos dictatorship, which was the time of censorship, arrests, imprisonment and killings of media persons. It will also cover the emergence of the alternative press, also called mosquito press or the anti-Marcos press,” the subject’s description read.