Patrick D. Flores

17 April 2021
8pm—9.30pm (SGT)

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This talk revisits two exhibitions to reflect on how sensible material is mediated by the values of “art” or “culture.” These values inevitably come to form the basis of “art history” and its “context.”  Through a curatorial procedure, the said material assumes presence in an intersubjective atmosphere that enables it to signify, situate, or evoke.  The exhibitions Crafting Economies (2002) and Bisa: Potent Presences (2011) are reconsidered in the effort to think about place-making and the “poetics of relation,” which inform the geopoetic gesture of both the art historical and the curatorial. Crafting Economies was part of the sprawling Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art (2001-2003), a project of the Japan Foundation that sought to register the contemporary art of Asia; and Bisa: Potent Presences was a response to the equally extensive Self and Other: Portraits from Asia and Europe (2008), an initiative by the Asia-Europe Museums Network, helmed by encyclopedic museums in London and Osaka, that intuited personhood and otherness in human figuration or the figuring of the human. The exhibitions in Manila sought to inflect the discourses around contemporary art and self/other through the problematics of craft and potency.

Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He was one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art in 2001-2003 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and is the Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for Venice Biennale in 2022.