ARTFAIRPH/TALKS

All events follow Philippine time zone (GMT+8)

Artists today explore unconventional and fresh approaches and strategies. Ged Uson Merino is known for his use of fiber and fabric as materials for sculptural and ephemeral works. Spanish artist Ampparito creates conceptual murals as empeheral interventions that subvert objects, meanings and realities to generate new experiences or situations. Meanwhile, Sa Tahanan Co. pulls together artists from the Filipino diaspora largely based in the Middle East.

---

About the Speaker/s

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ged Uson Marino

Ged Merino is a Filipino-American artist based in New York, Manila and Bogotá. He collects things discarded intentionally or incidentally, and his history includes a cycle of migration and
settlement, a movement of physical things. Through textile, the artist archives sentimentality, its communal and collective experience. Ged’s work is an attempt to make sense of a looming
historical incongruence between what is lived, what remains and what must be remembered.

He was selected for the Art Platform at the Singapore Art Stage 2015, 2018 was selected for “The Hybridity and Dynamism of the Contemporary Art of the Philippines” in Seoul Korea



Bernice delos Reyes

Sa Tahanan Co. began in the UAE as an arts collective that platforms Filipino creatives, first across the Gulf and then the globe — bridging the accessibility gap with institutional opportunities. Co-founded by curator Anna Bernice delos Reyes and artist Augustine Paredes in 2020, the collective focuses on arts practice as a means of diasporic representation in creative and cultural industries.

Through community building, cultural research, art exhibits, performance programs, art sales, and other creative collaborations, we make space for Filipinos in the contemporary art scene. The collective has also grown an active WhatsApp community of Filipino creatives from around the world — not only finding collaborators in each other but also sharing resources for project grants and other creative opportunities.

Select list of collaborators and commissioners:
Sharjah Biennial 16, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, Asia Art Archive, Jameel Arts Centre, NYU Abu Dhabi, Alserkal Avenue


Ampparito

Born in Madrid in 1991, the artist studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid before developing a practice rooted in counter-advertising, urban intervention and mural painting, which they pursued until 2019. Their work explores deception, infiltration and the fragile boundary between truth and illusion. Camouflage and trompe-l’oeil appear not as technical displays but as conceptual tools — ways to inhabit fantasy when reality proves immovable, and to expose how the false can become true and the true can dissolve into fiction.

Everyday objects are altered and displaced, serving not as finished forms but as triggers for behaviour and social reaction. The artist embraces the poetic absurdity of effort: hand-writing calendars until the year 2100 to mark the date of their own death, or installing hundreds of broken clocks so that one always displays the correct time. Humor and irony act as essential strategies, approaches to subjects too heavy to confront without a protective laugh.

Preferring non-art contexts, the artist situates works in daily life, provoking genuine encounter without the assumptions of contemporary art settings. His practice challenges certainty, disrupts habit, and invites viewers into a space where logic fractures and imagination briefly takes control.