Tessa Maria Guazon

Tessa Maria Guazon is art curator and assistant professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Her curatorial and research projects centre on public art, city spaces, and place making through contemporary art. Her current projects include Island Weather for the Philippine Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale, an exhibition of Mindanao artists in Southern Philippines to open November 2019, and forthcoming curatorial workshops and lectures for local organizations and art initiatives. She is principal researcher for Manila for the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network project organised by the Urban Knowledge Network Asia and the International Institute of Asian Studies Leiden, the Netherlands. The project is funded by The Luce Foundation New York. Her case study on art and gentrification considers the curatorial potential of research oriented projects. She is the coordinator for exhibitions and curatorial analysis for the Philippine Contemporary Art Network, a new platform for Philippine contemporary art. She has curated exhibitions for museums and institutions most recent of which are Lawas Public Art at the UP Diliman campus grounds; Consonant Forms, Resonant Practice at the Yuchengco Museum Makati City in 2018; and Gendered Bodies in Southeast Asia at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in 2019. In 2017, she co-curated for Tropical Cyclone at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts Taipei, Taiwan. Her exhibition Plying the Seas, Divining the Skies explored place, belonging, and loss in new media art , installations, and photographs of Taiwanese artists. She has received fellowships for research and fieldwork in Asia and has lived in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Japan. She was recipient of the 2013 Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship and was researcher in residence at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Japan in 2017. Her essays and reviews have been published in anthologies, academic journals, and exhibition catalogues.