The nature of contemporary art museums is such that the collections are global in scope with art from the former peripheries of the artworld (Asia, Africa, Latin America) appearing in western museums and vice versa. This panel brings together the Director of MACAN, Indonesia and the Senior Curator of International Art, Tate Modern to talk about their museums collecting programmes and the issues around representing contemporary art from around the world. How do they determine what should go into the collection? how established does an artists need to be? If a certain stature needs to be reached by the artists, is there a risk of seeing the same art and artists in museums in Tokyo, London, Jakarta and Mexico City? How do they ensure that their museums retain their unique voice/ vision?

Clara Kim, The Daskalopoulos Senior Curator, International Art ( Africa, Asia and Middle East), is responsible for the research and acquisition of art from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Working with a team of curators, she oversees four acquisition committees including the Middle East North Africa Acquisition Committee, the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee, the South Asia Acquisitions Committee and the Africa Acquisitions Committee. She also works on exhibitions and collection displays.

Kim has served on juries for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, Sundance Film Festival, Creative Capital Foundation, Herb Alpert Foundation and United States Artists. She also sat on advisory boards for the Kadist Foundation, Rockbund Art Museum, the Mayor’s Design Panel for the City of Los Angeles and the online publication East of Borneo. She previously served as senior curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and director and curator of REDCAT in Los Angeles.

Aaron Seeto is the Director of the recently opened MACAN, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara Indonesia. It is the first museum of its kind in Indonesia. The museum’s collection includes work by important Indonesia artists Raden Saleh, Affandi, FX Harsono and Arahmaiani Feisal. as well as leading contemporary artists such as Gerhard Richter, Anish Kapoor, Mark Rothko, Ai Weiwei.

Prior to his appointment as director of Macan, Seeto he was curatorial manager of Asian and Pacific art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art in Australia where he headed the team that organized the eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2015. Seeto has also served as director of Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Yee I-Lann‘s primarily photomedia-based practice engages with archipelagic Southeast Asia’s turbulent history, addressing, with wit and humanity, the socio-political impact of current politics, neo-colonialism, and globalization. Born in 1971 in Kota Kinabalu, capital of Malaysia’s northern Borneo province of Sabah, Yee received her BA in Visual Arts from the University of South Australia, Adelaide, in 1993. Now based in Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur, she has established herself over the past 20 years as one of the region’s leading contemporary artists, known for her digital photocollage series that deftly employ a complex, multi-layered visual vocabulary drawn from historical references, popular culture, archives, and everyday objects – works that speculate on issues of culture, power, and the role of historical memory in social experience, often with particular focus on themes and motifs that reference the indigenous cultures of Borneo.

Renato Habulan, Pablo Baen Santos, and Antipas Delotavo, three of the leading proponents of Social Realism in the Philippines, share the varied situations, experiences, and motivations that impact their practice in the 1970s until the present.

Habulan focuses on the prevalent modes of the period and the visual language specific to Social Realism. Delotavo shares how the cold war impacted his practice and his shift from abstraction to Social Realism. Baen Santos expounds on the visual language of Social Realism, the history of calligraphy and on the importance of writing in visual art practice.

The presentations, to be moderated by Marika Constantino, will underscore the crucial role of artists that continues especially today in the achievement of a just and equitable society.

Marika Constantino is a visual artist, curator, and the co-founder of 98B Collaboratory together with Mark Salvatus and Mayumi Hirano, where she is also its Executive Director. As a visual artist, she has participated in significant exhibitions in the Philippines and abroad. As a freelance writer, she contributes to a number of globally distributed publications. She shares her various experiences in the art practice to a wider audience as an educator and an independent curator. Her early exposure to art and her boundless fascination for the creative process resulted with a degree from the UP College of Architecture to further studies at the UP College of Fine Arts, with Art History as her major. In 2012, Constantino co-curated the exhibition “ReCollection: 1081: Clear and Present Danger (Visual Dissent on Martial Rule) at the Cultural Center of the Philippines to commemorate the 40th year since the declaration of Martial Law.

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Talks Tent, RoofDeck, The Link ArtFairPH/Talks

Representing Southeast Asian Art in Biennales, Museum Exhibitions and Archives
Representing Southeast Asian Art in Biennales, Museum Exhibitions and Archives

Through each of these platforms, audiences and researchers are offered a glimpse of Southeast Asian Art. The perspective presented is often that of the curators or the organizers of the exhibitions or those collecting for the archive. This panel will discuss the different ways in which they have represented Southeast Asian Art and how their visions have shaped the narrative. They will also speak about how each platform allows for different encounters with the art and its history.

Kim Sun-Jung is president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Established in 1995 in memory the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea is Asia’s oldest biennial of contemporary art.

Hirozaku Takayama is a curator with the Mori Art Museum which recently hosted the exhibition Sunshower : Contemporary Art from 1980s to Now.

Chuong-Dai Vo is a researcher for Asian Art Archive with a focus on Southeast Asia. Currently she is working on the archives of Green Papaya Art Projects the longest running independent artspace in the Philippines.

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Talks Tent, RoofDeck, The Link ArtFairPH/Talks

The Artist Run Biennale Manila Biennale: Open City 2018
The Artist Run Biennale Manila Biennale: Open City 2018

This is the first ever Manila Biennale and is set inside the walled city of Intramuros from February 2 until March 5, 2018. For an entire month, its many gardens, plazas, chambers, and museums will be transformed into platforms for art, performance and expression. The brainchild of Carlos Celdran, it takes as its theme OPEN CITY which refers to Intramuros as the origin of Manila’s culture. It is a tribute to the walled city’s beginnings as a port for the Galleon Trade, a time when Intramuros opened itself up to the world. OPEN CITY also refers to December 26 1942 when Manila was cleared of all military presence; a moment of tension between two colonized periods of Philippine history.

Executive Producer, Carlos Celdran and Chief Curator, Ringo Bunoan will discuss the conceptualization of the biennale and the journey to making it a reality.

8:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Talks Tent, RoofDeck, The Link ArtFairPH/Talks

Screening of Kidlat Tahimik Films
Screening of Kidlat Tahimik Films

Bahag Ko, Mahal Ko (Japanese Summers of a Filipino Fundoshi, 1996, 40 mins)
Kidlat Tahimik takes the bahag, traditionally a garment of respect, as a symbol of everything we have forgotten as a result of being the subjects of imperialist powers for more than three hundred years. The film starts as a conversation between Kidlat and his son, Kabunyan about Marilyn Monroe’s immense sex appeal which later transforms into a discourse on the malleability of concepts of beauty. The film then transports the discourse to Japan, where the tragic tale of the bahag, or fundoshi, is shared.

This is the first ever Manila Biennale and is set inside the walled city of Intramuros from February 2 until March 5, 2018. For an entire month, its many gardens, plazas, chambers, and museums will be transformed into platforms for art, performance and expression. The brainchild of Carlos Celdran, it takes as its theme OPEN CITY which refers to Intramuros as the origin of Manila’s culture. It is a tribute to the walled city’s beginnings as a port for the Galleon Trade, a time when Intramuros opened itself up to the world. OPEN CITY also refers to December 26 1942 when Manila was cleared of all military presence; a moment of tension between two colonized periods of Philippine history.

Executive Producer, Carlos Celdran and Chief Curator, Ringo Bunoan will discuss the conceptualization of the biennale and the journey to making it a reality.

Museums throughout the world have been established through private endeavor; private collections that have been made public. The same is true in the Philippines, it is the generosity of collectors that has allowed audiences access to some of the best artworks in the country; Ateneo Art Gallery, Lopez Museum, Ayala Museum, Vargas Museum and Pinto Museum. Dr. Ambeth R. Ocampo will speak about the scholarship, passion and spirit of stewardship that has driven collectors to acquire what they did and bequeath these to institutions.

Ambeth R. Ocampo is a historian, academic, journalist, former cultural administrator and author best known for his writings about Philippines’ national hero José Rizal and for Looking Back, his bi-weekly editorial page column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He served as the Chairman of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (2002-2011) and concurrently Chairman of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in (2005-2007). He recently bequeathed his own collection to the Ateneo Art Gallery.

International Center of Photography Collections Manager James Kopp will provide an introduction to ICP, featuring photographs from the different archives within the collection that tell the story of the founding of ICP as an institution and collection. The presentation focuses on images that illustrate the personal love and tragedy surrounding this history of photojournalists’ attempts to present the hard truths of social upheaval and concludes with a discussion of Weegee whose own profile was complex and complicated. Weegee’s standard-setting coverage of street crime serves as the segue to the conversation with Ezra Acayan and Raffy Lerma, who will discuss their experiences with the night beat, altogether analyzing the critical importance of the camera in bearing witness and of the photograph as a visual record of events. Both Acayan and Lerma are members of an informal collective of photojournalists that unofficially formed in the early months of the Philippine drug war. The group exhibited in Manila, Geneva, Sarajevo, Normandy, and Bangkok in 2017.

James Kopp has had extensive experience in collections and exhibition management, museum registration, international loan arrangements, art handling and exhibition installation. Prior to his current position as Collections Manager at the International Center of Photography, he has worked at the Museum of Modern Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, and Princeton University Art Museum.

Ezra Acayan is a documentary and editorial photographer based in Manila whose work primarily focuses on social issues and human rights. Named “Photographer of the Year” in the International Photography Awards Philippines last year for his work “Blood in the Streets,” his photography was showcased in the 2017 Lucie Awards at Carnegie Hall in New York. He and colleagues at Reuters have been awarded a special merit at the Human Rights Press Awards for multimedia reporting on the drug war.

Raffy Lerma, formerly of Philippine Daily Inquirer, received the 2017 Award of Distinction from the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility. Among his most famous photographs documenting the Philippine war on drugs since the beginning of the Duterte presidency is that of Jennilyn Olayres cradling the body of her partner Michael Siaron, subsequently referred to as the “Pieta” photograph. He has been featured in a New York Times documentary, has been interviewed by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!, and has been a regular speaker at schools, universities, and conferences both in the Philippines and abroad.

Discussion on Contemporary Philippine Photography with Curator Angel Velasco Shaw and Kat Palasi, Nana Buxani, Alex Baluyut, Boy Yñiguez, Kawayan de Guia and Paco Guerrero