The 2022 Curatorial Development Workshop Grantees

Jose Mari Cuartero is an assistant professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. Before joining UPD, he taught at Ateneo de Manila University for over a decade, where he designed courses that integrated literary studies with interdisciplinary perspectives, particularly from the fields of social sciences and sciences. This academic approach led him to explore the archives of a 19th-century polymath thinker, Isabelo de Los Reyes, who served as an inspiration for him to embrace his interdisciplinary interests, ultimately guiding him toward his current curatorial interests. This curatorial shift in his interdisciplinary practice reflects his broader commitment to reparative politics, which seeks to mediate and facilitate social repair by decolonizing the individualistic predilection of academic work through promoting a collaborative practice. Some of his essays have been published in Kritika Kultura, Philippine Studies, and CoverStory.

Joaquin Singson is a writer and cultural worker from Quezon City. His work is primarily concerned with the experiences and histories of the Third World during the Cold War, and how their political and material conditions manifested themselves in the music, cinema, and visual arts of the period. He was a recipient of the Loyola Schools Awards for the Arts for Nonfiction Creative Writing in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prize for Art Criticism that same year. He has written for local galleries and institutions such as Artinformal Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and his essays and poems have been published by Heights Ateneo, the Ateneo Art Gallery, and NANG Magazine.

Dominic Zinampan is a cultural worker who works mainly with text and sound. Since 2014, he has been the bassist of the Manila-based rock band The Buildings. In 2016, he received a Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prize for Art Criticism and his writings have since been featured in publications like ArtAsiaPacific, Art+ Magazine, and Perro Berde. As the Managing Editor of Green Papaya Art Projects, an independent and artist-run multidisciplinary arts platform founded in 2000, he worked on projects like Right People, Wrong Timing (2020) and Laswa and Miso Soup Diaries (2021). He is currently an officer of the Education and Research Committee of Tambisan sa Sining, a labor rights-oriented cultural mass organization.

Philippine Contemporary Art Network

Tessa Maria Guazon
Curator and Associate Professor
UP Vargas Museum and the Department of Art Studies, College of Arts and
Letters, University of the Philippines Diliman Quezon City

Tessa Maria Guazon is an educator, writer, and contemporary art curator based in Manila, the Philippines. Her more recent research and curatorial projects include the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET) where she is principal researcher for Manila. SEANNET is organized by the IIAS (International Institute of Asian Studies) in Leiden, the Netherlands, and funded by The Luce Foundation New York. She is co-curator for the traveling exhibition Notes for Tomorrow organized by the ICI International (Independent Curators International) New York, curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the 58th Venice Art Biennale, and lead curator of the fifth edition of Panit Bukog Contemporary Art from Mindanao. She has been invited to the Interlocutors Program of the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial organized by the QAGOMA (Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art) Brisbane, Australia and to the curatorial team of the 2021 Asian Art Biennial at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, Taiwan.

She received the University of the Philippines One UP Professorial Grant (2022 to 2024), the University of the Philippines Artist Award (2016 to 2019, 2013 to 2015), and the Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship from 2013 to 2014. She was a researcher at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Japan in 2017, and will be researcher-in-residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul this 2023 .

Her essays and reviews have been published in anthologies, academic journals, and exhibition catalogs. Her recent writings include chapters for the book Adhika on the University of the Philippines Diliman art collections, food relief networks and artist initiatives in Manila during the pandemic (London School of Economics Press), a forthcoming book chapter for an anthology on art and vernacular resilience (Amsterdam University Press), and an essay on contemporary art in the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (Central Bank of the Philippines) collection.

Patrick Flores is a Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and concurrently Deputy Director at the National Gallery Singapore. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Art After War: 1948-1969 (2015); and Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017). He was a Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He was the Artistic Director of the Singapore Biennale 2019 and Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Renan Laru-an (born 1989, Berlin/Sultan Kudarat) is a researcher, curator, and the artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. He organizes exhibitions, designs public programs, and initiates research directions that explore the ‘insufficient’ and ‘subtracted’ images or subjects at the juncture of development and integration projects. Such depth of artistic and intellectual curiosity situates Laru-an as a founding member of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN), a recently initiated public institution for contemporary art temporarily housed at the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum. Through the years, Renan has been co-curator of the 2nd Biennale Matter of Art, Prague (2022); the 6th Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2019); the 8th OK.Video—Indonesia Media Arts Festival, Jakarta (2017); and he was also a Curatorial Advisor to the 58th Carnegie International.

Roberto G. Paulino is an associate professor and former chairperson of the Department of Art Studies at UP Diliman. He is part of the NCCA’s Pool of Experts in the field of Fine Arts relating to the implementation of the Guidelines on the Declaration / Delisting of Cultural Properties as National Cultural Treasures (NCT) or Important Cultural Properties (ICP) and Removal of Presumption as Important Cultural Property.

He was a contributing editor of The Modern in Southeast Asian Art, published by the National Gallery Singapore and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2023, and a contributing writer on the forthcoming book Dominador Castañeda: Painter, Teacher, Writer.