01 → Curatorial projects
Lost time and the motions of the in-between
A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur
Artist: Joshua Kane Gomes
9 Aug to Sep 6, 2025
What happens when a motion is repeated, isolated, and/or amplified? When a sound, whether heard or merely sensed—a drip, a creak, a pulse—lingers longer than it should, what kind of resonance does it leave behind?
Lost time and the motions of the in-between is built around lingering: around moments that don’t quite end, around the tension between movement and stillness, and around presence and absence. It convenes kinetic sculptural configurations of hands, linocut prints, sonic fragments, and a video loop that attune us to the muffled choreography and scenography of the mundane.
Joshua Kane Gomes approaches this as a form of world-building. The world imagined is not a narrative landscape but a temporal one: a visualisation of limbo, of lost time. He describes this like the ocean at night—vast, unknowable, disoriented by the absence of light, and yet not empty. It is through this darkness where waves cannot be seen but can be heard; you feel their pull, which provokes sensations: the splash of water gently kissing the shore, the cool ocean breeze, and the echo of something just beyond reach. It is calm, yet in constant motion, a contradiction that mirrors the emotional terrain of limbo or suspended time.
The exhibition is an inquiry into time’s registers, perhaps one that is at once tactile, auditory, and conceptual. Through works on display, hands are portrayed as predictably spirited, being primary conductors of resonance, holding a piece of driftwood, steering a wheel, notating music, echoing a drip, and devising gestural movements. These are normally unseen, unheard, and unfelt until they are looped, mechanized, and made to speak, carrying affective and sonic charges. In the same lens, the sculptural works in this exhibition don’t just move; they hum with memory, repetition, and dormant emotion, which help us tune into the latent frequencies of the ordinary. For the artist, these function as navigation tools within uncertain territories, where driftwood forms serve as anchoring points, while kinetic sculptures mark time’s passage through repetitive gestures.
Furthermore, Gomes reflects on the ideas of micro-time and macro-time, something visceral or external, natural or mechanical flow of systems and time. The kinetic sculptures mark time not just with precision, but with feeling. They loop and pulse not like industrial machines, but like breath, or a ritual. In this sense, the exhibition resists productivity, linearity, and resolution. It offers a temporal space that is slow, intimate, and gently disorienting, reinforced by familiar objects and motions.
Works from Lost time and the motions of the in-between are slowed down, repeated, and given life, which accumulate resonance: a flick of a finger becomes a metronome, a held object becomes a weight of memory, and a drip becomes an infinite interval. One is invited to tune in, to participate in this world-building, not to look for meaning, but to feel frequencies, these motions of the in-between where time doesn’t move forward—it ripples. In this space, such resonance becomes a trope to understand how mundane actions, all-too-familiar materials, and forgotten sounds can vibrate with new intensity when recontextualized.
In Lost time and the motions of the in-between, the everyday is rendered acoustically and spatially expressive, not only through representations of motions of everyday visual cues, but also through mechanisms of attunement to frequencies we might otherwise miss. From the rhythm of droplets from a faucet, the friction of finger taps on wood, and the ghost of a musical phrase before it’s played, among others. Each of the works here is transposed as a resonator, vibrating the threshold between the mechanical and the intimate, the silent and the sonic. - azc
Curatorial Conversations (2024-2025) by Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila
Collaborators: Creative Industries Management Program and Benilde Center for Campus Art
The program is intended for practicing curators who wish to engage with peers and other like-minded practitioners in the field of contemporary curating to think about and discuss curating as a collaborative practice that requires practical support and networks. The incubator program has five days of talks supported by seminar-style mentoring.
2024: Practices and Potentials
Five days of talks supported by seminar-style mentoring, with discussions revolving around key concepts in the thinking, development, and production of exhibitions, devoted to exploring the concepts of 1) contextualization, 2) content production, and 3) the use of stories as a means to explore inclusive practices.
Speakers and mentors include Lara Acuin, independent curator, Manila; Amanda Cachia, curator, and assistant professor and assistant director of the Master of Arts in Art Leadership Graduate Program, University of Houston, Texas, USA; Alain Zedrick Camiling, chair of Creative Industries Management program at DLS-CSB, Manila; Clare Carolin, curator and lecturer, King’s College, London,UK; Joselina Cruz, MCAD director/curator; Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director of The Jim Thompson Art Center and co-artistic director of the Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023, Thailand; Jihoi Lee, curator of architecture, installation and sculpture at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; Esther Lu, independent curator, Taipei, Taiwan; James Tana, independent curator, Manila; Mayumi Hirano, independent curator and researcher, Manila and Osaka, Japan.
2025: Politics and Reflexive Practices
Carrying the theme Politics and Reflexive Practices—with ethics, politics, and social practices as topics—the intensive program will equip participants with the tools needed to engage art in a society besieged by authoritarian capitalism, climate catastrophes, wars, and educational decline.
Speakers and mentors include Con Cabrera, visual artist and independent curator; Alain Zedrick Camiling, chair of the Creative Industries Management program at DLS-CSB; Binna Choi, one of the curators for the Hawai‘i Triennial 2025; Joselina Cruz, Director/Curator of MCAD; Amanda de la Garza, Artistic Deputy Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS); Clementine Deliss, Curator at Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels, and KANAL Guest Professor at Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels; Lee Weng Choy, art critic based in Kuala Lumpur; Kamini Sawhney, founding Director of Museum of Art & Photography (MAP); Alia Swastika, one of the curators for the 16th Sharjah Biennale
Anok (2024) by Mark Salvatus
Performers: siglo, Arvy Dimaculangan, and V Soriano / Music: Teresa Barrozo, Abigail Taniegra and Erika Estacio
Co-producer: FIFTH WALL / Line Producer: Alain Zedrick Camiling /Production Assistant: Alexandra Alcazar
One element during the Pahiyas festival that the locals make and display is the “anok” – a term used in Lucban to resemble a dummy or mannequin that depicts a farmer, worker, weaver, or resident. It is made of vegetables and fruits, complete with a farmer’s outfit and complemented with farm tools such as the “bolo” and “salakot”.
From these, Mark Salvatus creates a life-sized anok to become a puppet and will be animated by puppeteers. Creating movements of all-too-familiar gestures of a live person - walking, sitting, dancing, checking the phone, exercising, cooking, cleaning, among many others, accompanied by live improv sounds using kitchen utensils.
Magbigay ayon sa kakayahan, kumuha batay sa pangangailangan / Give what you can, take what you need (2023)
Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2023 Official Philippine Entry
Recognition: Intercultural Exchange Award
Curators: Ellawyn Cruz and Alain Zedrick Camiling
Design Collaborators: Hershey Malinis and Joaquin Aranda; Benilde School of Arts, Culture, and Performance Batches 118, 119, 120, and 121
Supported by: The Philippine Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic; De La Salle- College of Saint Benilde; National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA); Metrobank Foundation; and other individual supporters
Interconnections between life and relationships, memory and remnants, closures and continuities, histories and positionalities are explored in discourses on quotidian aspects, suggesting networks and networked relationships. In the Philippines, some manifestations of these networks and networked relationships in the past years include honesty stores in locales and the emergence of community pantries during the pandemic. These further point to notions of kapwa (connecting myself with others or being the other) and bayanihan (being a bayan or town, which redirects to communal solidarity), pointing to gestures of care.
These are translated through a makeshift community pantry containing local merchandise and reproductions of artworks through postcards, which participants can get copies of in exchange for anything they feel like giving; a karaoke system to channel celebration of such solidarity and hospitality as seen in common Filipino gatherings; among others.
The title ‘Magbigay ayon sa kakayahan, kumuha batay sa pangangailangan’/ ‘Give what you can, take what you need’ is lifted from Ana Patricia Non’s community pantry movement in the Philippines in 2021, when she initiated a cart of groceries, with a humble cardboard signage, set up in Maginhawa Street, Quezon City. The movement served as a mutual aid in response to the pandemic struggles, which revealed strong social solidarity that gained traction and inspired a lot of local and global communities.
In this exhibition, performance making, scenography, and curatorial practice are perceived as propellers of these networks and relationships that connect bodies of knowledge, gestures of care, creative and artistic practices, and encounters through atmospherics. - azc
Art Fair Philippines 2024 Residencies Exhibition [Visual Reports]
Artists: Julian Tapales, Mark Salvatus, Jett Ilagan, Anna Miguel Cervantes, Renz Baluyot, Iseult Perrault, and Petr Hajdyla
Curator and Exhibition Designer: Alain Zedrick Camiling
Supported by: Don Papa Rum
Off-grid (2022) by Mark Salvatus
Collage, coconut lumber, light bulbs
Curated by: Alain Zedrick Camiling
Festival Mall Alabang, The Manila’Bang Show 2022
Central to Mark Salvatus’ installation is the Art Association of the Philippines’ (AAP) 1955 Rotary Club Competition where artists employing conservative art-making style staged a walkout opposing the jury decision to confer all recognitions to those perceived modernists. He references this as the most-cutting edge at that time when the competition entries were hung in unlikely places for art presentation like in the streets and particularly the Rizal Park. Such deliberate response brings forth a perceptual register to the idea of off-grid: something that potentially evokes independence and fluidity, connecting points outside a perceived grid for a purpose, and having a sense of cohesion.
Off-grid features archival materials such as greetings and postcards showing rural Philippine landscapes gathered from a second-hand shop in Manila. Having actual pencil gridlines, Salvatus perceives these as indicative and reminiscent of two areas of discussion. Firstly, these works were transferred onto canvas or another material by a skilled painter who most likely is influenced by Amorsolo sensibilities. And secondly, practices which stem from the Mabini Art Movement in post-war Manila referencing to two-kilometer Mabini Street, where commercial art spaces emerged in the 1940s.
In addition to the cards, Salvatus also shows broken grid maps based on the unrealized plan of prominent American architect and city planner Daniel Burnham, who envisioned modernizing the capital city Manila, developed as a miniature Washington D.C. and Baguio City as summer capital of the Philippines but then disrupted in the 1940s.
In this lens, the artist juxtaposes ideas of rural and urban, conventional and atypical, among others, through a makeshift construction scaffold as an exhibition site. It posits a tangent to the idea of exhibition-making and installation art as situated in an alternative commercial art space where people’s interests are particularly tied to leisure and necessity, inside a shopping mall located in a robust urban landscape. It is through this exhibition where the artist responds to the idea of an art fair or an event which is pointed to specific art market pursuits, complicating another layer of how diverse audiences can experience and respond to artistic and creative resonances. -azc
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CONSULTANT - DIRECTOR (Exhibitions and Education Programs), Museo Pambata (Children’s Museum), 2024 - present
CONSULTANT, Metrobank Foundation Art and Design Excellence Competition - 2025 Featured Medium Category, 2024
CONSULTANT - CURATOR, Museo Pambata (Children’s Museum), 2023-2024
COMMITTEE MEMBER and MENTOR, Upskilling on Performance and Visual Arts Curation, by Cultural Center of the Philippines, 2023-2024
CO-CURATOR, About the patience of ordinary things by Altro Mondo Contemporanea, Makati City PH, with Gian Carlo Delgado, Jul - Aug 2024
CURATOR, Kinabuhi: Suyam and Ompo of the Agusan Manobo - Carlito Amalla by the Philippine Embassy in Rabat, Morocco, Oct 2022
CURATOR, Ang Ating Mga Kayamanan sa Bakuran: Jandy Carvajal by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Jul - Aug 2022
CURATOR, The stories we live by - Renato Balute, Jr, and Exhibition Series, by Arte Bettina and Galerie Roberto for Art Fair Philippines 2022, Mar 23 - Apr 2022)
CURATOR, Thriving in the midst, leading the ascent - online exhibition, by Metrobank Art and Design Excellence, Jan - Dec 2022
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR and CURATOR FOR PUBLIC PROGRAMS, The Manila’Bang Show 2021 and 2022, Festival Mall Alabang, Muntinlupa City, Dec 2021 and Dec 2022
DEPUTY CURATOR, Alimuom: Ibagiw Contemporary Visual Arts Exhibition, Baguio Convention Center, Cordillera Administrative Region, 2021
PROJECT CO-HEAD, The Baguio Art Archive Project: Histories, Developments, and Trajectories, with Fara Manuel-Nolasco, Ibagiw Festival, 2021
CO-CURATOR, bcc: in search of cures | correspondence art in the pandemic by Baguio Art Lab and Japan Foundation, Sep - Dec 2020
CURATORIAL COORDINATOR, Images of Nation: National Artists in the BPI Art Collection at Ayala Museum, Makati City Bank of the Philippine Islands and Ayala Museum, Feb - May 2019
CURATOR, Pandayan: Arts and Culture Lecture and Workshop Series, by BPI Foundation, Lucena and Lucban, Quezon and Tacloban, Leyte, 2019
PROJECT MANAGER, Art Cataloging Project of Bank of the Philippine Islands, Jun 2018 - Feb 2019
CURATORIAL RESEARCH ASSISTANT, University Collections Mapping Project led by Dr. Cecilia dela Paz, University of the Philippines Diliman, 2018
CURATOR, Shades and Sounds of Bangladesh Exhibition, by the Bangladesh Embassy in Manila and De La Salle- College of Saint Benilde, Sep 2017