Renan Laru-an

Renan Laru-an is a curator and theorist working in contemporary arts. His exhibitionary, public, and research projects examine “insufficient” and “subtracted” images, subjects, and artistic works unsettled by development and integration projects. He was the curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

Former artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary, founding member of Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN), and founder of DiscLab | Research and Criticism, Renan co-curated the 2nd Biennale Matter of Art, the 6th Singapore Biennale, the 8th OK.Video – Indonesia Media Arts Festival in Jakarta, and Lucban Assembly, alongside exhibitions and programs with Sharjah Art Foundation, TPAM – Yokohama Performing Arts Meeting, and UP Vargas Museum. He edited Writing Presently (2019), Meridians of Region (2021), and Rosa Mercedes Journal IV. His forthcoming books include General Nourishment: The Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Arts in Marawi and Exhibitionary Heritage.

Born in Sultan Kudarat, Renan lives in Berlin.

Anecdotal

Beyond criticism, I have been thinking a lot about the comparative and how, as an analytical tool, it has been embedded in curatorial intelligence. Almost a default, go-to methodology in most familiar modes of curating (contemporary artistic output) today, including deconstructivist approaches, such as decoloniality, identitarianism, or even indigenous studies; the comparative has faced irreversible cracks in the revenge of “undisciplined” and “unruly” intelligences to the method itself. Its intellectual edge is repurposed in communication and management strategies, in the shift of paradigm into content production, and cultural politics at large.

I am issuing an embargo on comparativity. I follow two veins in this presentation: one, censorship as we don’t know it; and two, dancing with Indigenous women. The former returns to benign moments of curatorial meetings in a para-institutional, collective-acting, POC-dominated organization where comparativity is oversaturated, atomized. The latter, on the other hand, brings me to the foot of a mountain where open-pit mining operates, inhabited by the Blaan peoples in southern Mindanao, where comparativity is ad hoc.

When the task of comparison is really an accounting of knowledges, in which the curatorial performs in order for knowledge to function in the public sphere, what happens when this comparison is corrupted, non-performing, unhoused, de-platformed? Especially when the comparative is eternally self-exhibiting, confessional in its liberal form; what if no one or nothing shows up?