Clara Balaguer (b. 1980) is a cultural worker interested in the decolonization of cultural production most especially through the lens of contemporary vernacular.

For seven years, the Manila-based writer, graphic designer, publisher, and cultural historian has led the Office of Culture and Design (OCD), a social practice that produces art projects and research in marginalised communities. Under this banner, the Filipina-Spanish multi-tasker has published books on street-style typography, postcolonial cultures and native cuisines. She has also produced a film about typhoon victims, hosted graffiti workshops, and circulated an online taxonomy on nationalistic graphic design. For Balaguer, cultural consumption should not be treated as a luxury, but rather as an everyday necessity for the masses. There is more work to be done. But as the Philippines enters a dictatorial political chapter, she has had to evaluate the shelf life of her projects.

Balaguer is also the Head of Social Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam and tutor in Experimental Publishing, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. She founded The Office of Culture and Design in 2010, a platform through which she articulated research, residencies, and social practice projects in the Philippines. She explores collaborative authorship through the clandestine publishing of Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage-industry fuelled imprint she co-founded in 2013. She has lectured at Walker Art Center, Harvard GSD, MIT, Strelka Moscow, MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy, Hanyang University Seoul, and University of the Philippines. Her work has been exhibited and performed at Asia Culture Center, Singapore Art Museum, Art Dubai, Hangar Barcelona, and La Capella.

Jed Escueta graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of the Philippines. He was part of the Green Papaya Art Projects Residency Program Wednesdays Open Platform funded by Arts Network Asia Singapore in 2009. Escueta has participated in both solo and group exhibitions at Silverlens Gallery, Light and Space Contemporary, Osage Gallery in Hong Kong, Green Papaya Art Projects, Post Gallery, Photo Bangkok, Vinyl on Vinyl, and Art Dubai.

Czar Kristoff (b. Camarines Sur, 1989) is an artist who works across photography, video, performance, intervention, and publishing. His current practice which sometimes requires public engagement is based on his inquiries on memory, identity, and the theme of unlearning. 

His work has been exhibited locally at Vargas Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, MO_Space, 98B Collaboratory, West Gallery, 1335 Mabini, Blanc Gallery, and Drawing Room Gallery and internationally at Danselhallerne Copenhagen, Art Dubai Marker, C3 Artspace Melbourne, Atelier de Koekkoek Vienna, Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, Jogjakarta National Museum, Westergasfabriek Amsterdam, PrintRoom Rotterdam, and Tai Kwun Contemporary Hong Kong. 

He has also done lectures in the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, ArtEZ Institute for the Arts, Arnhem, and several locations in Singapore and Manila. 

Kristoff is affiliated with Hardworking Goodlooking, a publishing and design hauz interested in decolonization, horror vacui, and tropical diaspora, and Temporary Un/Re/Learning Academy, an experimental school that focuses on de-centering art and cultural production in the Philippines. 

He lives and works in Laguna, Philippines.

KoloWn is based in Cebu, Philippines. Established in January 2007, they are named after the oldest national road in the Philippines, Colon street that is located in Cebu. KoloWn is not an individual artist but a street art network, whose individual identities are unknown to the public, and even to each other. As a collective of multiple individuals, Kolown’s styles, techniques, and media are all diverse in their form. They create art in a unified mission to colonise, or “kolownize”, all possible streets of Philippines with their wit and charm. They have evolved into a brand that sells ambiguous ideas, using a variety of techniques and styles to produce bizarre products that stimulate critical thought.

KoloWn works amongst the noise, intervening in public spaces with the same vigour as street signs and advertisements. Often KoloWn’s work hides in plain sight, simultaneously belonging and disrupting the places they inhabit. At home within urban spaces, KoloWn’s work acts like a glitch in alleys and busy roadsides, calling for a second consideration, pointing at absurdities and punctuating often overlooked bits of contemporary life. 

KoloWn gained further notoriety when they received the prestigious Ateneo Arts Awards (Fernando Zobel Prize) in 2018, for their site-specific work, “Low Pressured Area” located at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Their work was recently on view at Artinformal as part of the group exhibition, Self-Portrait as Mirror/Mirror as Self-Portrait which examines the self-portrait through works by artists that work within a pseudonym.

Cris Mora is a Filipino-Canadian artist and cultural worker.  He was born in Manila in 1984 and moved to Toronto at the age of four. Mora studied painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.  In addition to his art practice, Mora is also an experienced cultural worker.  He has worked as a registrar for Newzones Gallery, a commercial gallery in Canada; the exhibition designer for the Singapore Tyler Print Institute; and as an estimator for Momart, a London based Art-Logistics Company.  Mora has exhibited in Canada, Singapore, and the Philippines. He currently lives and works in Manila.

Mawen Ong (b. 1964) is an artist and gallery director in Manila. She is a member of King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, an initiative dedicated to archiving and preserving the works of Roberto Chabet. She obtained 2 business degrees at St. Scholastica’s College and eventually studied Painting at the University of the Philippines - College of Fine Arts. She has been exhibiting since 2005 in both solo and group exhibitions at Future Prospects, Green Papaya Art Projects, West Gallery, Osage Gallery Hong Kong, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Blanc Gallery, and Silverlens Manila, among others.

Nicole Tee (b. 1993) is a visual artist from Manila, Philippines. Her practice explores forms and textures anchored on domestic processes, with themes revolving around facets of memory, place, and the home. She utilizes various media such as textile, thread, flora, collage, oil painting, and multimedia in her works. Of late, her preference has been the use of fabric as subject matter and material. Tee is attracted both to its formal attributes and to the slow, repetitive gestures that the manipulation of fabric entails.

Tee graduated with a BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines in 2016. She received the Department of Studio Arts Outstanding Thesis Award. She was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards (2017) and the Sanag: UP Art Prize (2023). She has been participating in various group shows around Metro Manila, and has mounted solo exhibitions at Artinformal, Blanc Gallery, Finale Art File, Tin-Aw Art Gallery, Underground Gallery, and West Gallery.

‍

The Weather Bureau is a social architecture and engineering conglomerate that designs propositionary structures and conditions in the idealized state of utopia. They build from seemingly failed plans of defunct totalitarian states and re-adapts and rehabilitates them in their ideal settings or rather in nowherelands in timeless stasis.

Founded in 2010 by Lena Cobangbang and Mike Crisostomo, who started collaborating as production designers and product stylists for ad virals, print, packaging designs and stage sceneries. Their vision as The Weather Bureau is to picture essences of the ideal as inherently dictated by the constraints of the form, illustrating perhaps an ideology in plasticity.

The Weather Bureau’s initial project “Experiments in Degree Zero” had been exhibited in the previous space of Blanc at Makati and at Manila Contemporary. They had also been part of The Complete and Unabridged Part 2, one of such exhibits organized by King Kong Art Projects to commemorate Roberto
Chabet’s 50 years of his art practice. This was held at Osage Gallery in Hong Kong in 2011.

The Weather Bureau had also been featured in the July / August issue of Pipeline magazine, a HK-based art magazine. In November 2013, they were selected for an art residency under San Art in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.

MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city. 

These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.

The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.

MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).