Curatorial Development Workshop: Open Call and Launch
1. Introduction
The Japan Foundation, Manila (JFM), the Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN), and the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum announce an Open Call for proposals for a free online Curatorial Development Workshop to be held on October 21, 23 and 24, 2020 via a digital platform.
The Workshop, the sixth in the series since 2009, seeks to reflect on the relationship between the social context of the public health crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and the kind of curatorial mode responsive to the ecology of production. This production has been disrupted because of the restrictions on basic mobility; domestic and international travel; physical interaction; and general everyday activity. This situation, coupled with uncertainty and unpredictability, has affected the economic and emotional well-being of everyone all over the world and rendered daily life and the imagination of the future precarious, even as various forms of violence have in the same breath heightened.
This call for proposals coincides with the launch of the digital version of the catalogue titled Curatorial Development Workshop Exhibitions held from December 7, 2019 to March 7, 2020 at the Vargas Museum. The curators of the project (Karl Albais, Pristine de Leon, Jay Nathan Jore, Carlos Quijon, Jr., Cristian Tablazon) were selected from the Curatorial Development Workshops held on October 5-6, 2018. You can download the catalogue here.
2. Dates
October 21, 23 and 24, 2020 (3 days)
3. Platform
via Zoom Conference. Details will be available to selected applicants.
4. Speakers and Mentors
Patrick Flores (Director, PCAN and Curator, UP Vargas Museum)
Tessa Guazon (PCAN)
Renan Laru-an (PCAN)
Roberto Paulino (PCAN)
Taufik Darwis (Co-Founder, Bandung Performing Arts Forum, Bandung)
Chuong-Dai Vo (Researcher, Asia Art Archives, Hong Kong)
Kamiya Yukie (Director, Japan Society, New York)
5. Number of Participants to be selected
Maximum of 9 persons
6. Eligibility
Applying candidates must fulfill the following eligibilities:
- Those who have broad interests in curatorial practices which include contemporary art, art history, architecture, material culture, music and performance and so on;
- Those who are 35 years old or below at the time of application;
- Those of Filipino nationality residing in the Philippines or overseas.
7. Application
Please submit the duly accomplished application form and the required documents to UP Vargas Museum via email (vargasmuseum@up.edu.ph) on or before September 14, 2020.
<Required Documents>
- Application form [ Download: curators-application-form-2020 ]
- Essay
Applicants are required to write an essay (800 to 1000 words) to be titled “Before/Beside: The Curatorial as Supplement.” It should respond to the Brief [ Download: CDWBrief ] and to propose ways to mediate the projects proposed by PCAN, enumerated below. Likewise, the chosen participants will be commissioned to curate projects in relation to the conceptual concerns of the brief and to any one or a combination of the following initiations:
- Nena Saguil: Search as Method
The desire to propose the art history of the Philippine artist Nena Saguil leads to Paris, where she lived and worked for almost four decades beginning in the fifties. In the archives in Paris, Saguil figures faintly and intermittently. Such faintness and intermittence are productive, in fact the basis of a possible art history, if the latter is still the term by which to abide. It may well be a bare art history, or art history barely. The search is likewise able to constellate geographies of art whirling in Paris in the sixties and seventies through the delicate and scintillating presence of Saguil.
- Curation as a Collectivist Practice: From Collaboration towards Co-operation and Communal Care
The project considers intersections between the collective and the curatorial. It will reflect on curatorial engagements with art practices that are ‘participatory, collaborative, interactive and relational.’ Recent art-historical terms describe these as ‘socially engaged, community based, experimental, interventionist, and collaborative.’ Curators and artists who work with communities realize that these forms of exchange are open-ended and unpredictable. They may not necessarily translate into exhibitions as we know them. How do collaborations of this nature enter the exhibitionary economy? What kinds of translation transpire in the process? How might these trajectories allow a reconstruction of the exhibitionary and the unpacking of the increasingly wearisome term ‘collaboration’? These questions arise from an interest in research led curatorial practice and community-based engagements by artists and collectives. Discussions that will arise aim to construct new ways of understanding togetherness, co-operation, and forms of communal care. These can possibly resuscitate the notion of ‘care’ originally attributed to curation, within the shared burden of a crisis.
- But Ears Have No Lids: A Screening Program on Attention! Attention! and Attention.
The screening program takes the site of hearing as the first moment of “being touched.” This project trusts the instantaneous, unadulterated transformation of vibrations into intrusive voices and unnecessary feelings that suddenly induce us into movement and action. The regime of positivist psychologies persuades us to concentrate on our individualist breathing: a mindfulness that compartmentalizes and delays the reception (‘touches’) of the world to us. While in isolation, But Ears Have No Lids insists on the morphology of ears as the functional representation of attention that sustains awareness and engagement. Paying attention is now an attentive touching, a strange and senseless demonstration of and listening to a call, “Attention! Attention!” Moving laterally from the interrogations to artistic agencies and the curatorial paranoia around worlds on strike, the screens nominate the value of keeping our ears uncontrollably open, after the disappearance of sight and hearing with ‘touches’ that call the world from exclamation to a declaration—in disregarded darkness, “Attention.”
8. Notice of Award
Those who are accepted to participate in the workshop will be informed no later than September 30, 2020.
9. Inquiries
For inquiries, please email vargasmuseum@up.edu.ph