Keynote lecture

“From the field, to spaces for art, and out into the world”

Tessa Maria Guazon

Head curator, UP Vargas Museum (University of the Philippines Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center) & Associate Professor, Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines Diliman

What does it mean to have a research-based or research-led curatorial practice? What primary sources do we find in the field, and how are they transmuted or translated into the exhibitionary? How can exhibitions become portals to the senses, and how can they allow us to ‘feel sensuously,’‘think critically,’ and ‘act mindfully’ upon the world?

These are questions I will address in the lecture. I will share how years of fieldwork and research in Asia and elsewhere have shaped my practice, and how my training and background as a researcher, writer, and designer have helped me think them through. I will cite the curatorial projects I realized in Taiwan (‘Plying the Seas, Divining the Skies,’ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, 2018; Phantasmapolis, the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; and Horizon Ablaze, Taichung Art Museum, 2026), and other exhibitions, alongside the relationships nurtured (or sometimes severed) throughout years practicing as a curator. 

I will speak about the role of the curator as an interlocutor in the dynamic processes that transpire in the field we regard as the curatorial. Our contemporary world, riven as it is by crisis, asks that we rethink our practices, if not the entirety of how we live. How can we let art lead us into forms of thought that repositions it in the vortex of an increasingly wild, and even hostile, world? I propose that the foremost role of the curator is to allow an ‘expansiveness,’ for art’s circles of influence to expand, and lead us back into the wider world where it is conceived, practiced, and shared.

Title: “From the Field to Spaces for Art, and Out into the World”

Speaker: Tessa Maria Guazon (Head curator, UP Vargas Museum (University of the Philippines Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center) & Associate Professor, Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines Diliman) 

Venue: 1F, Lecture Hall, MonTUE

Date and Time: 19 December 2026, 10:00-11:00

Caption for the images (please include two images in this poster): 

Image 1: Exhibition view, "It's too late to give up," Neli Ruzic (Croatia), for Horizon Ablaze, Taichung Art Museum, 2026 (Xhin Mania, courtesy TcAM)

Caption for the portrait photo: credit JL Javier

國立臺北教育大學當代藝術評論與策展研究全英語碩士學位學程

National Taipei University of Education MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art

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National Taipei University of Education