Artists and Curator Profiles Samak Kosem investigates transnational sexuality frameworks that circulate and connect them to sexual discourse, practices, and subjectivities as well as migration and religiosity. His first project on “nonhuman ethnography” (2017–ongoing) in Southern Thailand considers how queerness is inhabited in Muslim culture through the contexts of nonhuman relations. Samak’s work questions the mobile forms of sexual citation and assemblage as persuasion to undo stories and allow for new meanings of sexuality. Samak was born in Bangkok and raised in Rayong and Nonthaburi. He relocated to Chiang Mai in 2004 for his undergraduate studies and received his BS and MA in anthropology and continued his doctoral study at Chiang Mai University in Social Sciences. Samak’s first group show The Enmeshed (2017) and his first solo show Otherwise Inside (2018) were held in Bangkok. His artworks have been presented in galleries in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. Samak’s writing has recently been published by Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia. Gary-Ross Pastrana’s art has been one of the most persistent in terms of combining concepts with objects. Pastrana received his Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines in 2000, where he was awarded the Dominador Castañeda Award for Best Thesis. In 2006, Pastrana received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award. He has shown at the Singapore Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and was part of the 2019 The Art Encounters Biennial in Romania, 2019 Singapore Biennale, 2012 New Museum Triennale in New York, 2010 Aichi Triennale, and 2008 Busan Biennale. In 2004, he co-founded Future Prospects art space. In addition to his artistic career, Pastrana curates and organizes exhibitions in Manila and abroad. P am Quinto graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts, major in Studio Arts (Painting) in 2014 from the University of the Philippines, from which she received the Outstanding Thesis and the Gawad Tanglaw awards for her undergraduate thesis. She is the founder and curator of Parcel Exhibitions, a portable exhibition modality developed in response to the arts immobility caused by pandemic lockdowns. Quinto has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Manila and elsewhere, including Figure-proof (2020) at A+ Works of Art; A will for prolific disclosures (2020) at The Drawing Room; Double Double, Moore in Trouble (2019) at Tin-Aw Gallery; For Every Atom Belonging to Me (2019) at the Sampaguita Art Projects; and Kabit at Sabit (2019), a one-day simultaneous presentation of multi-site site-specific projects all-over the archipelago organized by Load na Dito Projects; to name the most recent. She is set to hold her first solo exhibition at Mo_Space in October this year.
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