Filipino artist presents PH’s past and present through collages at Art Basel Miami Beach

Filipino artist Norberto Roldan presents PH’s past and present through collages at Art Basel Miami Beach | Photo from Silverlens

Artist Norberto Roldan is the artistic director of the longest-operating artist-run organization in the country, Green Papaya Art Projects. Unfortunately, the art space was ravaged by a fire in 2020. But thanks to preservation efforts by the Asia Art Archives, many of its materials survived and are now hosted online. 

Green Papaya has since relocated to Roldan’s hometown, Roxas City, where it now runs a residency for Thai, Vietnamese, and Filipino artists, a rural architecture forum with a local university, an initiative with local Indigenous people, and projects with surrounding fishing and farming communities.

Roldan has continued with his art practice rooted in social and political issues. His medium of choice varies from assemblages and paintings of found objects, text fragments, and found images, but all address issues surrounding everyday life, history, and collective memory.

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His collages made up of disparate materials that address the fraught history of the Philippines and its contemporary struggles—six of them—are currently on display at a solo booth at Art Basel Miami Beach until Dec. 10, courtesy of New York and Manila gallery Silverlens.

Two of these collages, part of a series called “100 Altars for Roberto Chabet,” are made up of ziggurat-like assemblages with architectural elements of demolished homes in the Kamuning neighborhood of Quezon City, where Green Papaya was previously located, along with old photographs and sundry possessions. 

He began creating them in 2014, a year after Chabet, widely considered the father of conceptual art in the Philippines, died in 2013 at 76.