The Curatorial Development Workshop Exhibitions have been initiated through the continuing cooperation between the Japan Foundation, Manila, the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum, and the Philippine Contemporary Art Network to foster conditions of curatorial learning and exchange. The project Curatorial Development Program, which began in 2009, gathered 17 participants in November 2018 for a workshop. Five proposals were chosen from this cohort to be presented in a range of platforms: exhibition, publication, and public program. Three exhibitions were realized in December 2019 and which ran until March 2020: Pristine de Leon’s Built on Sand, Carlos Quijon, Jr.’s a knowing intimacy or a life, and Cristian Tablazon’s Variations of the Field. Alongside the exhibitions, two projects were also presented: Karl Albais’s Tao at Kalawakan and Jay Nathan Jore’s Humble Objects.
These initiatives explore the potentials of curatorial practice to shape space discursively and to shape discourse spatially. They are attentive to how knowledge is produced, activated, or discussed and how a proposition is realized in a particular ecology of site and constituency.
Through these gestures, the curators reveal the anxieties and desires of their time as they look back on and sustain the lively atmosphere of encountering and sensing the myriad materials of contemporary art and culture.
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