Julius Poncelet Manapul Artist

About the Artist

Julius Poncelet Manapul

Practicing Contemporary Artist, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Drawing & Painting, Faculty of Art, OCAD University.

Julius Poncelet Manapul was born in Manila, Philippines in 1980 and immigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1990. They attained his Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2009 from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, completed a one-year residency in Paris, France from 2009 to 2010, and earned a Professional Art Studio certificate from the Toronto School of Art in 2010-2011. Julius completed their Masters of Visual Studies at University of Toronto in 2013, along with their Sexual Diversity Studies Certificate from University of Toronto. Their work had been presented at Koffler Gallery (2016), University of Waterloo Gallery, A Space Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017). Manapul work has been exhibited at Toronto Nuit Blanche, Toronto World Pride, Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival, Toronto Queer Film Festival, had been featured several times on CBC Television Network, had been written in several academic articles, Journal of Asian American Studies Vol.19 #3, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas Vol.1 #2, Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries" to name a few, had hosted workshops and panel talks on queer diaspora decolonize research, and had shown works in London-UK, Paris-France, Berlin-Germany, and US.

A queer migrant Filipinx, Ilocano artist, and a descendant of Maria Josefa Gabriela Carino de Silang, known as an anti-colonial fighter during the 18th century Spanish rule over the Philippines, the first female leader of a Filipino movement for independence from Spain.

Manapul's multidisciplinary art practice and research examines eternal displacement, complicated by colonialism, sexual identity, diasporic bodies, global identity construction, and the Eurocentric Western hegemony. Focusing on the hybrid nature of Filipinx culture through post-colonial realities, and the gaze of queer identities as taxonomy. Excavating narratives specific to diaspora queer bodies and the loss of motherlands. Hybrid images question the problematic side of queer communities that uphold homonormativity through whitewashing and internalized racism, which challenge forms of oppression.

Excavating their experience of immigration and assimilation through cultural erasure. Their research looks at the narratives for many diasporic queer bodies that create an unattainable imagined space of lost countries and domestic belongings and globalized imperial power that begs the questions: What is sacred? What is worshiped or held up as perfect? What is masculine? Who decides? And who has the power?