Patrick Flores is Chief Curator of National Gallery Singapore. He is Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network and was Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Art After War: 1948-1969 (2015); and Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017). He co-edited The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader with T. K. Sabapathy (2022). He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019 and Curator of the Pavilions of the Philippines (2015) and Taiwan (2022) at the Venice Biennale. He curated the Philippine Pavilion as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2025. He was the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor in 2026 at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Overseas: A Photographic Poetics
This keynote reflects on how the term overseas touches on the ecology of water and land and the migration of forms and people. Through the photographic medium that is imagined as formative, ecology and migration are brought together to evoke an archipelagic condition that is simultaneously diasporic and ancestral, geopolitical and mythopoetic. The lecture focuses on the practices of two Philippine photographic artists from different generations–Ricardo Alvarado and Nana Buxani—to flesh out the poetics of overseas in inter-cultural communities in the United States, the disputed maritime territory of the South China Sea, and the intricate waterways of Manila. Finally, it proposes the estuary as a contact zone between oceans and cities that indexes multiple inter-local and inter-island circulations.