On curatorial praxis, strategies and the Philippine Contemporary Art Network
By Ho See Wah

Renan Laru-an is a Philippine curator and researcher whose interests are in insufficient and subtracted images, histories and subjects. The curator has a number of projects under his belt, including co-founding the research and writing platform DiscLab | Research and Criticism, being the Public Engagement and Artistic Formation Coordinator for the Philippine Contemporary Art Network, as well as (co-)curating ‘ Lightning Studies: Centre for the Translation of Constraints, Conflicts and Contaminations’ (2016), ‘From Bandung to Berlin: If All of the Moons Aligned’ (2016), the 8th OK. Video – Indonesia Media Arts Festival, Jakarta (2017) and the 6th Singapore Biennale ‘Every Step in the Right Direction’ (2019).

We speak to him on the occasion of his latest project, ‘But Ears Have No Lids’ (2021) as part of the larger programme of exhibitions called ‘Proto/Para: Rethinking Curatorial Work’ by the Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN) at the UP Vargas Museum.

I understand from your Art Radar Journal interview that you came into curation quite informally. Could you speak more about how you started, as well as your first curatorial project?
I worked as a part-time assistant in a painting restoration project for two years after college. That was my initiation into fine arts. At the time, without any art education, I thought curating only emerged from exhibition-making.

The daily operations of the laboratory were synchronised with the timeline of an exhibition, where a 19th- or 20th-century painting had to appear publicly. I primarily cleaned and documented the “wounds” and other marks of deterioration in artworks. While both exhibition-making and preventive conservation operate on inspection and exposition, these two practices of care have different understandings and use of touch. In exhibitions, we tend to confront an artwork, so our first connection with it is always frontal. A restoration attempt immediately turns to the recto, where your gaze activates your hand to locate signs of damage and provenance on the back of an artwork. The eye-hand coordination in exhibitions and restoration tells us a lot about our relationships with contact points and how we determine our urgencies based on the moment we touch an artwork or are touched by an artwork. A decade since my first job, I am realising that perhaps touch is the curatorial par excellence.

‘Approximating’, 2014, programme poster. Design by Jan Pineda. Image courtesy of DiscLab | Research and Criticism.

Professional curating came later in my career. With no credentials in exhibition-making, I participated in an intensive programme for emerging curators in Gwangju in 2014. At the time, the professionalisation of curating was steadily gaining legitimacy in the region through this model of short-term education and cultural exchange. This was in addition to the growing interests among local practitioners to be further trained in the standards of curating abroad. When I shared previous projects with my fellow participants, I had to invent my heritage to the curatorial. That’s when I became accustomed to describing DiscLab | Research and Criticism as a curatorial project. I remember introducing it to my peers with a short description: “Our work is like building a garden between two anthills.” I still carry this nourishing promise of cultivation four years since the organisation went offline.

At the same time, you identify yourself as a researcher, and you founded DiscLab | Research and Criticism in 2012, a collaborative platform for artistic research and writing. What was the impetus for initiating this? How have your experiences with it influenced the way you work today?
When DiscLab | Research and Criticism published its first issue online in December 2012, a new generation of initiatives was already operating with varying intensities and commitments in the local contemporary art scene: Planting Rice, founded by curators Lian Ladia and Siddharta Perez in 2011; 98B COLLABoratory led by curator Mayumi Hirano and artist Mark Salvatus in 2012; and The Office of Culture and Design through Clara Lobregat Balaguer in 2010, among others. For these differently-constituted institutions, including DiscLab, platform-making was a shared agenda, and collaboration was the seed capital. These features sustain the history of the alternative, which is both a territory and a timestamp commonly attributed to the “artist-run.”

But if you look closely at these post-2010 practices, there was a consciousness that is not solely invested toward the priorities of the singular artist. The approach to artistic production links the interdependency of agents, infrastructures, and publics with cultural values other than the exhibition of artworks. With this energy, these so-called Do-It-Yourself platforms actively relocated the legacy of the alternative from its calcification in anti-institutional performance to the terrains of peer engagement. Such attachments started with understanding each other’s practices as a contribution to the lifelong development of arts.

“With this energy, these so-called Do-It-Yourself platforms actively relocated the legacy of the alternative from its calcification in ant-institutional performance to the terrains of peer engagement.”

Education, research, literacy, management, networking, custodianship and audience development—however intelligible or maligned they were to documentation and assessment—then became more integrated and visible in our professional interests and practices. My sense is that a form of collegiality has allowed these intensities and virtualities to be organised, preparing us to be more open in negotiations where certain cultural values are at stake. This clearly was not some ragtag collectivism anymore. These were ante-institutional forces that were proposing to work collectively in an ecology of practices. Whether this was a successful model or not is another story.

‘Failure/s in a Constellation and as a Tribunal’, 2014, part of Disclab’s ‘Squatting Knowledges’, 2013-2016, Post-Museum, Singapore. Photo by Jan Pineda. Image courtesy of DiscLab | Research and Criticism.

This history is important to articulate now —thanks to your prompt— because I can make more sense of my motivation and ultimately to be kinder reviewing the programmes DiscLab and peer initiatives had created, the decisions that came with those activities, and the relationships that were formed from that time. In the print publication An Auto-Corrected Journal of Printing Properties (2014) published by The Office of Culture and Design, I edited and compiled some of the texts and projects DiscLab produced for its first two years online. In the introduction, I wrote that we always begin with a submission. This characterisation can be considered nostalgic because of its problematic connotation or memorialisation, but I find it useful in sharing the impetus that punctured the moment of professing to work in the arts. It shows how any initiative reorganises the tasks at hand and recruits new obligations in the work of art.

Defining this obligatory sustains my profession. It modulates the movement toward over-professionalisation or becoming overeducated, which tend to promote standardisation of values and practices. The dilettantism of a researcher inflects the programme of specialisations, and in effect, the researcher can work within a network of many foreclosures predetermined by ideological, sociopolitical and biological obligations. This image easily puts the researcher as the quintessential subcontractor of our time, but what the researcher inevitably accumulates in the process of promiscuous engagements are the faculties that mobilise competing obligations. Research has an overdue relationship with intelligence. I think they must be temporarily disconnected so that research can be taken seriously as an adventure of charismas.

DiscLab was quite hard to pin down, because it did not settle in the categories of the editorial, exhibition, artist-run, or collective among other constitutions of the alternative. I accept this displacement, and I understand that I need to be migratory in thought, praxis and community. I continue to work this way, without habitus and perpetually following the grace of research.

Could you give us a brief overview of your research interests and methodologies?
I am attracted to insufficiency and subtraction. These are practical resources, too. One productive result of such interests is that I am not tied to the expected identities of context-specificity or other constructs that are imposed on us. This position is of course not without difficulties because it is often judged as opportunistic, flimsy and dishonest. But perhaps this is the nature of subjectivities without a heritage in criticality and art?

The curatorial is a hospitable methodology for insufficient and subtracted images, histories and subjects. The net output of insufficiency or subtraction is always disappointing because its potential and performance difference is high. And as self-appointed caretakers, we find solutions to improve its performance or to eliminate barriers to its growth. Living with constraints is esoteric and unsustainable. That is why it is hard for us to imagine other forms of experience that coexist with our able-bodiedness and neurotypicality. Among the chronically and terminally ill, for example, constraint is a source of self-abundance, in which suffering and risk become opportunities to hybridise with life. These insufficiencies unsettle our agency because we encounter lives that are always already subtracted from dependency on independence.

Curating, without a doubt, has a long tradition in nutrition and extension. Its technology is capable of performing analysis and transplantation: curating forests, seismic movements, riots, oceans, borders, friendships and more. This mode of address can thematise curating; or worse, curatorial practices become themes. I am not very interested in this curatorial, which has some alarming implications in contemporary historiography as it favours content historicization, turning the curatorial into data. How the curatorial attends the conditions and consequences in the remission of illness, absence of cure, or misdiagnosis or lack of etiology is the curatorial I wanted to practice. Such a mode always works with the artistic – creative enterprises of looking and understanding that are not necessarily and solely owned by the artist or an artwork. This provisionality of the curatorial is where a theory, tool and method come together. It is never a triage, a workflow, or a supply chain.

“This provisionality of the curatorial is where a theory, tool and method come together. It is never a triage, a workflow, or a supply chain.”

With collaborating artists Christina Schultz and Michaela Michalak in ‘Footnote No. 4: Please be more specific’ (2016) presented by ‘Lightning Studies’ at Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona. Photo by Marzia Matarese. Image courtesy of Hangar.

Your work consistently engages with geopolitics and transregionalism. An example is ‘Lightning Studies: Centre for the Translation of Constraints, Conflicts and Contaminations ’ (2016), a research project that examines distinct contexts and experiences through the translation of Robinson Crusoe from European to Southeast Asian languages. Another one is ‘From Bandung to Berlin: If All of the Moons Aligned’ (2016), an exhibition that looks at the transnarratives and connective nodes of the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Could you speak about this interest?
Both references invite viewers and readers alike to this constellation of the geopolitical, transregional, and trans-narrational. What usually happens here is that data about “minor”, “forgotten” and “overlooked” histories, or the narrative capacities of artists are accessed in this type of exhibitions. In short, ‘Lightning Studies’ and ‘From Bandung to Berlin’ are assumed to be these eloquent storytellers for different publics. With this reception, artists and curators would have to take an impossible position where they reimburse their subjectivities with the cosmopolitan attention of a “critical viewer”.

For ‘Lightning Studies’, which have had iterations in Barcelona, Manila and Yokohama, the desire was to establish an affective institution for relational translation. At Hangar, a residency institution in Barcelona, I developed it in a non-exhibition format that took the forms of a performance event and a series of discursive activities dispersed in the city. In Manila at the Lopez Museum, it was an exhibition titled ‘Lightning Studies presents PASÁ PASÂ (Etiologies of Bruising)’. For this, I created fictional charts on the etiology of pasá-pasâ (bruised all over) and pasâ (bruising) composed of texts and images from early 20th century health and science journals of American-occupied Philippines. I also exhibited two undated works by 19th-century Philippine artist Félix Resurrección Hidalgo from the museum collection, ‘Ofelia’ and ‘Mar Revuelto’, together with a preserved specimen of the St. Ignatius bean, which was from the National Museum. Two years later, the charts from this set of works was reinstalled in a performing arts event in Yokohama with the same title of the Manila iteration. Unlike their museological setting, the charts were printed on large-scale thermal paper and exposed to the harsh lights of a theater. The quality of images and texts diminished after a few days. It was also funny how this work was set up. In Yokohama, the exhibition acted as the anteroom or waiting room for a performance, while in Manila, it spread along the hallway to the rotunda and then to the alcove as if the viewer had to flow with air to see the exhibition.

Bureau of Melodramatic Research (Alina Popa & Irina Gheorghe), ‘Above the Weather’, 2015, exhibition installation view at ‘From Bandung to Berlin’ (2014). Image courtesy of SAVVY Contemporary.

For ‘If All of the Moons Aligned’, which I co-curated with Brigitta Isabella who initiated the From Bandung to Berlin (FBB) project in 2014, the exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary worked as the displaced research scenography of FBB’s curatorial period. The selection of artists clues us in to its execution. With the help of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the institution’s director, we presented artworks or projects that could complicate the speculative timeline between two real events. We also showed video works one at a time in the first three days of the exhibition, which I imagined to be quite gimmicky. Brigitta and I firmly believed that the exhibition must not be accessed as a content provider alone, so these strategies were employed to disrupt the informational flow. The exhibition space was akin to a gymnasium, where bodies are trained, and sweat is accumulated. But we were serious about this question of how we could approach an “incomplete” or “weak” exhibition, which used the Berlin Wall and the Bandung Conference as references.

I share these conceptual and exhibition details to emphasise that prefixes such as “trans”, “de”, “post”, “un” and “anti” are powerful terminologies that demand too much from us such that proficiency in explanation is never enough to drain the weight of these terms. I find it very hard to curate these compound subjects. I am interested in these affixes as much as the next curator, but I am more interested in how an attachment itself could be a site to tease out other concerns that may have lower frequencies and partial visibilities than terms like transregional.

But Ears Have No Lids Artist Talk with Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela from PCAN on Vimeo.

This thematic concern plays out in your latest project, ‘But Ears Have No Lids’ (2021), which will take place at both UP Vargas Museum and online. The one-year screening programme finds its roots in the idea of extraterritoriality through the practice of Tel Aviv-based artist duo Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela. Tell us more about the showcase, and why you decided to make it a year-long affair. Could you also elaborate on the concept of extraterritoriality, and its relevance to Southeast Asia?
The first volume of screenings that cites extraterritoriality through the practice of Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela is part of a year-long program on hearings. I was getting more and more intrigued by the interplay between our images of hearing and our expectations of attention. It reminds me of bulong sa patay (whispered to the dead), a translocal superstition that believes that the recently departed, who is transitioning to another world, possesses the most potent and sensitive auditory power in transforming a wish to a reality. And in the case of children’s language for fight, touching the opponent’s ear declares courage (tapang in Filipino and isog in Hiligaynon). That touch either resolves or escalates a misunderstanding shows us the prelinguistic relationship between attention and negotiation. This is an early visualisation of diplomacy. I thought how clever it is to witness the law choreographed in children’s ears. We can also learn from this image that children have principles of necessity, proportionality and certainly humanity.

Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, ‘Beyond Guilt — The Trilogy’, 2003-2005, video in colour, 42 min, exhibition installation view. Images courtesy of the artists and Vargas Museum.

With Maayan and Ruti’s works, I wanted to add extraterritoriality to the index of references that we use in discussing political issues in the Philippines or within the region. The primacy of artistic articulation and the migration of another context are important factors in programming it right now. It can contour or transmogrify the information that the “critical viewer” has accumulated on extraterritorial matters. It can also challenge the tenacity and diligence of the viewer’s critical attention that we assume to be the fountain of analysis and engagement. The many tender moments in Maayan and Ruti’s films showcase the value of keeping our ears open beyond forensic aptitude.

This extraterritoriality calls for being collocated in all the whispers of the world. The public programme tries to demonstrate various conditions of extraterritoriality: Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina’s discussion of sumpah (oath) in their artistic intervention and research across Riau Islands and Singapore; Alberto Ong, Jr. highlights the local actors of tuberculosis in a global health campaign; and Patrick Flores’ reading of Nena Saguil across the orbits of “beyond”, “within” and “anti”. Discussions with legal scholar Gemmo Fernandez and documentarist Adjani Arumpac have also been helpful in thinking about fundamental concepts, such as territory, sovereignty and jurisdiction in the realms of the internet, outer space and Post-Cinema.

Japan Foundation-PCAN Curatorial Development Workshop participants, 2018. Image courtesy of Vargas Museum.

‘But Ears Have No Lids’ contributes to a programme of exhibitions called ‘Proto/Para: Rethinking Curatorial Work’ by the Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN) at the UP Vargas Museum. Majority of these curatorial projects are the culmination of the Curatorial Development Workshop that PCAN co-organised with the Japan Foundation in Manila. Conceivers of selected proposals underwent mentorship with PCAN members and were prompted by the conditions of a pandemic to reassess the sequence and situation of business-as-usual exhibition-making. Younger practitioners were oriented by additional directions to curatorial labour, which in turn promoted “research”, “remediation”, “project”, and “production” to be curated instances. This introduces the audience to a curriculum of aesthetic experience. I think the urgent task of a contemporary curator to their public, who can be trapped in the exhibitionary in content engines, is to offer a different aesthetic vocabulary.

“I think the urgent task of a contemporary curator to their public, who can be trapped in the exhibitionary in content engines, is to offer a different aesthetic vocabulary.”

You are the Public Engagement and Artistic Formation Coordinator for PCAN. Could you tell us more about this role, as well as what PCAN hopes to achieve for the local art ecology? And to close off, what do you envision for the future of the Philippine art scene, and what do you hope you can do to realise this?
The thread that I am holding right now can be collapsed into two nodes: engagement and formation. These generous processes are effective stations where I do further research on the “public” and “artistic,” familiar terms that are passionately contested and ridiculously unarticulated. In 2017, I broached these tasks in an exhibition, ‘An Ecological, the Obligatory’ which looks into three sites of cultural production: Los Baños, Dumaguete and Marawi. Recently, PCAN launched ‘Writing Presently’, an anthology of recent writing on contemporary art in the Philippines. I enjoy the possibilities that my role enables, and I do not think I can appreciate my work in the same way that I do now had the organisation been rigid, impermeable or standardised. For smaller and slower art institutions like PCAN, they become more necessary than ever because they serve as habitats for creative practice and for its habits to grow and continuously re-establish itself in an ecology of obligations.

‘An Ecological, The Obligatory’ (detail), 2017. Image courtesy of Vargas Museum.

PCAN is quite incidental in its institutionality and very much sensitive to the realities of a bureaucratic life among other social forces. In this sense, and quite frankly, it exists because there is a job to be done. It stands in the midst of wild pollination on one end, and on the other, artificial breeding. I know it is not the most professional way of representing the institution, but I think it is an inspiring tone that advocates institutional work for local practitioners. Institutional work carried by a freelancer, a private individual or a civil servant can improve the publicness of art. It gives confidence to the work of art in public service. This institutionality creates new tasks in art that can be sustained by other practitioners.

‘But Ears Have No Lids’ and ‘Proto/Para: Rethinking Curatorial Work’ is on view from 19 February to 9 April 2021 at UP Vargas Museum and online.