Marian Pastor Roces

Marian Pastor Roces, Curator and Principal Partner, TAOINC, Metropolitan Manila, Philippines

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator, cultural critic, and policy analyst working out of her base in Manila, Philippines. She founded and leads TAOINC, a corporation that curates the establishment of museums and develops exhibitions, parks, and publications. TAOINC recently accomplished the creation of the Cultural Center of the Philippines online museum, for which Roces supervised the creation of a new decolonizing Accession Record System (ARS). Her current project is a cross-cultural museum in an island province only now moving on from 50 long years of sectarian war.

An internationally published author, Roces’s writings have addressed: the biennale form, in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, MIT Press (2007), and The Biennale Reader, Bergen Kunsthall/Hatje Cantz [2010]; museology, in House of Glass: Culture, Modernity, and the State in Southeast Asia, ISEAS Publishing, Singapore (2001); diverse cultural material, in What to Let Go?, Para Site International Conference (at press 2023); the intersection of contemporary art and human agony, in ‘Transitional Justice and Eroded Institutions’, Areté, Ateneo de Manila Press (2022); art and entropy, in Climates. Habitats. Environments., MIT Press (2022). Gathering: Political Writing on Art and Culture, an anthology spanning 45 years, was published in 2019 by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, and Art Asia Pacific, Hong Kong.