Curatorial Notes

In Ged Unson Merino’s exhibition for Art Fair PH/Projects clusters of mosquito nets or kulambo, serve as an intimate symbol of a tropical shelter. In the Filipino context, to be inside of it is to be granted comfort, power, and belonging. He draws from his own experience of migration: he first moved from Manila to New York on a one-year scholarship, but a chain of opportunities led him to stay on for 27 years, before moving to his wife’s hometown in Bogota. Through the material, Ged raises questions about safety and inclusion: “are we protecting ourselves or are we isolating ourselves?”

Through an obsessive return to a single material, Ged’s work generates meanings that proliferate and intersect. The kulambo expands into an intricate map of associations—of migration, community, disturbance, care—revealing how ideas perpetually mutate along with the movement of people.

–Carla Gamalinda

About the Artist

Ged Merino is a Filipino-American artist based in New York, Manila and Bogotá. He collects things discarded intentionally or incidentally, and his history includes a cycle of migration and settlement, a movement of physical things. Through textile, the artist archives sentimentality, its communal and collective experience. Ged’s work is an attempt to make sense of a looming

historical incongruence between what is lived, what remains and what must be remembered.

He was selected for the Art Platform at the Singapore Art Stage 2015, 2018 was selected for “The Hybridity and Dynamism of the Contemporary Art of the Philippines” in Seoul Korea.