Jet Pascua: Transference

What shapes our present? How much should we forget, and how much should be remembered? How do traumas scar our bodies and minds throughout time and space, influencing who we are—both as individuals and as a society? 

All these questions are at the heart of Jet Pascua’s latest solo exhibition, entitled Transference. In psychoanalysis, transference can refer to the redirection of traumatic emotions onto a substitute, most often the psychoanalyst himself/herself. In the psychoanalytic work of Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière , transference denotes the passing on of the experience of social catastrophes from generation to generation. Thus, at the intersection between historical events and personal stories of trauma lie deep, invisible scars that influence the destiny of entire families and nations.  

Jet Pascua’s research and artistic work profoundly reflects this subtle interaction between our collective history and personal stories of loss and abandonment, of violence and fears, but also of hopes and potential for positive change. In his current exploration of the dual interplay between forgetting and remembering, Pascua draws upon his own family history, as well as on the traumatic events that have shaped the Philippines, his home country. 

In Jet Pascua’s installations, we are invited onto a journey of remembrance, from fading memories carved into wooden busts to historical emblems that evoke the traumatic legacy of colonization. Visually arresting, Pascua’s work has an inquisitive and sensitive quality, almost like wandering in a dream that feels too real. 

This exhibition reminds us that transference of pain from one generation to another affects us in hidden ways, like patterns underlying the web of our lives and of our societies. Jet Pascua’s work also invites us to remember the past in order to build a better present, reminding us that we have the opportunity to stop repeating the traumatic patterns that have been passed on to us.