Regional Art Forum (RAF)

Regional Art Forum (RAF) is an initiative that caters to the needs of local or region-based practicing artists, academics, and counter experts in the field of art. It is a nonprofit organization or network of visual artists, writers, community workers, scholars, and counter experts that promote art reception and contemporary art practices in the regions.

Community Art Archive

Community Art Archive (CAA) is a nomadic collection of documentations and publications on regional and/or community art practices. It is the concrete materialization of one of RAF’s objectives, which is to encourage scholarship or research on regional and/or community art in hope of producing publications and the building of archive for these publications and related scholarships.

Street Art Tradition

by Nomar Bayog Miano Art criticism has a tendency to couch valuations of art in a historical mold. This tendency pushes certain elements or features of artistic traditions to the margins of discourse.

On Tactics: Women, Art, and Pedagogy

by Ivy Marie Apa On Pedagogy as Art Eighteenth-century Enlightenment has enacted changes in the way, Western societies value artistic productions.

On Squatting: DIY in Third World Space

by Nomar Bayog Miano The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted. Michel de Certeau – The Practice of Everyday Life

Looking for Action: Performance, Video and Direct Art in Cebu

by Paul Grant In 1991, Alice Guillermo, the respected Manila-based art critic published a much-needed history of Cebuano art entitled Cebu: A Heritage of Art [1]. Guillermo eloquently expounded on works created in Cebu, from church ceilings to what she referred to as the then contemporary "crop" of artists. While the work is a laudatory, necessary and insightful effort, one might be struck by certain gaps, not in the history she recounts, nor in the group of artists whom she celebrates, but rather more generally in the very concept of art described: in large part what we encounter in this avowed heritage is painting. The resultant picture is of an artistic tradition touched by certain realist schools, folk art, tendencies in art brut, and a fair amount of portraiture and landscape.

RAF+CAA Community Art Program

The RAF+CAA Community Art Program is an all-year-round open-to-proposals program of and for community art practices. This program provides personnel and intellectual support to artistic and/or cultural initiatives that are in line with RAF’s agenda.

Art Talk: Proximity

Artists Talk with Nomar Miano, Ivy Marie Apa, Alfred Marasigan, and Soika Vomiter 8 March 2017 @ c3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, Australia

On Cebuano Art and Culture

Art Talk Creative Hub Gallery with Dr. Erlinda Alburo and Raymund Fernandez

this/here

A Collective Community Exhibition with Chuah Shu Ruei 856 G Gallery, Mandaue City, Philippines

this/here is an exhibition by Australian artists Tania Smith and Kubota Fumikazu. The exhibition combines two seemingly incongruous practices—Tania Smith’s performative photographs and video exploring representations of women using costume and humor, and Kubota Fumikazu’s hard-edged, geometric compositions recalling the history of early 20th century abstraction.

Dunia-Kalibutan

A Collective Community Exhibition with Chuah Shu Ruei 856 G Gallery, Mandaue City, Philippines Malaysian contemporary artist Chuah Shu Ruei holds a participative community art project that is an extension of her series of paper collages called ‘Dunia’ (The World), which dwells on themes of interconnection, dichotomies, perspectives, boundaries, transcendence, and change. The project intends to incorporate traditional heritage into contemporary art.

RAF Videos

2018 Austronesian International Arts Award Recipients 2018

2018 Austronesian International Arts Award Recipients 2018