Exhibition & Curatorial Analysis
Tessa Maria Guazon (b. 1973, Manila) is curator and Assistant Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Her curatorial and research projects center on urbanization, city spaces, and place-making through contemporary art.
She has curated exhibitions for institutions, most recently: Lawas Public Art at the UP Diliman campus grounds and Consonant Forms, Resonant Practice at the Yuchengco Museum Makati City. In 2017, she co-curated Tropical Cyclone at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts Taipei, Taiwan. Her exhibition Plying the Seas, Divining the Skies explored place, belonging, and loss in new media art, installations, and photographs of Taiwanese artists.
Current projects include the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network organized by the Urban Knowledge Network Asia and the International Institute of Asian Studies Leiden, the Netherlands. Her case study on art and gentrification considers the curatorial potential of research-oriented projects. She curated Island Weather for the Philippine Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Arts Biennale.
She has received fellowships for research and fieldwork in Asia and has lived in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Japan. She was recipient of the 2013 Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship and was researcher in residence at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Japan in 2017. Her essays and reviews have been published in anthologies, academic journals, and exhibition catalogs.
Public Engagement & Artistic Formation
In his research-oriented curatorial work, Renan Laru-an (b. 1989, Sultan Kudarat) studies “insufficient” and “subtracted” images and subjects at the juncture of development and integration projects. He takes artistic and curatorial mediation as practices of translation, custodianship, and invention of scenes for knowing and imagination.
Between 2012 and 2015, he directed the self-organized DiscLab | Research and Criticism, a multidisciplinary platform and “virtual” organisation for critical writing, theory, discursive activities, and long-term research on Philippine contemporary art, visual, and network culture.
He initiated the transregional project Herding Islands, Rats and the Anthropocene and the ongoing Lightning Studies: Centre for the Translation of Constraints, Conflicts and Contaminations (CTCCCs). He was (co-) curator of the 8th OK. Video – Indonesia Media Arts Festival, Jakarta (2017) and other recent exhibitions, including A Tripoli Agreement, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2018); Lightning Studies: CTCCCs presents PASÁ PASÂ, Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting, Yokohama (2018)/Lopez Museum and Library, Manila (2016); The Artist and the Social Dreamer, Forecast Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017); and From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned (with Brigitta Isabella), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2016).
With support from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, he is currently conducting curatorial research titled Promising Arrivals, Violent Departures, a preliminary study into the text-image relations of two community-oriented, culture-based publications initiated and edited by non-Muslim American missionaries, produced and circulated after the Japanese Occupation (Mindanao Cross first published in 1948) and during the height of ethno-religious conflict (Dansalan Quarterly first published in 1979) in the settler island of Mindanao, an ancestral domain of predominantly ethnic Muslims.
He received a degree in psychology from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, and has participated in international and regional fellowships and residencies.
Knowledge Production & Circulation
Roberto Eliseo G. Paulino (b. 1969, Quezon City) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines in Diliman.
He holds a double major in Visual Communication and in Art History (magna cum laude), an MA in Philosophy, and a PhD in Philippine Studies all from UP Diliman. He was the recipient of the Washington Sycip Award for Best General Education Learning Material given by the UP Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and co-author of a textbook on contemporary Philippine Arts from the regions (2016).
He is Project Leader for Research of the University Collection Mapping Project in UP Diliman, and Core Member of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) Technical Working Group for Teacher Training and Instruction Programs (TWG TeachTIP).