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.