Horizon Ablaze

Nobuo Takamori is a Japanese-Taiwanese curator currently living and working between Düsseldorf, Germany, and Taipei, Taiwan. He served as the chief curator of the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, Phantasmapolis, organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition sought to explore Asian futurism and science-fiction perspectives within contemporary Asian art.

Over more than a decade of professional practice, Takamori’s curatorial projects and research initiatives have focused on uncovering subtle and often overlooked connections between Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Global South, while fostering bilateral exchanges in contemporary art through practice-based collaboration programs.

Takamori’s notable projects include “Post-Actitud” (2011, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico DF), “South country, South of Country” (2012, Zero Station, Ho Chi Minh City & Howl Space, Tainan), “Is/In Land: Mongolian-Taiwanese Contemporary Art Exchange Project” (2018, Art Space 976+, Ulaanbaatar & Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei) and “The Secret South: from Cold War Perspective to Global South in Museum Collection” (2020, Taipei Fine Arts Museum). Takamori’s awarded project “The Oceans and the Interpreters” (2022-2023) has been tour to Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Cameroon.

Tessa Maria Guazon’s research and curatorial practice focus on contemporary art in the public realm across Asia. She is the head of the UP Vargas Museum (University of the Philippines Jorge Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center). Her more recent projects include Fever Dream, an exhibitionary experiment in temporality and scale, and the public programs she initiated at the Vargas Museum, notably, Gardens and Homesteads, a social practice initiative. She is the lead researcher for the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Collective, organized by the Singapore University of Social Sciences and the International Institute of Asian Studies. She is among several curators for the traveling exhibition Notes for Tomorrow, organized by the ICI New York, which the UP Vargas Museum hosted. She was part of the curatorial team for Phantasmapolis, the 2021 Asian Art Biennial at NTMoFa, and she curated the Philippine Pavilion at the 58th Venice Arts Biennale. 

She has done fieldwork and research in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. She was a researcher at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan in 2017 and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2023. Her essays have been published in academic journals, exhibition catalogs, and anthologies in the Philippines and overseas. Her recent publications include a chapter on art and resilience from Amsterdam University Press and a catalogue essay for MOCA Taipei. She teaches curatorial studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

Juan Canela is the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Cader Institute of Central American Art at the Reina Sofía Museum. Recently, he has curated the Projects section at Artbo Bogotá (2024), co-curated the 23rd Paiz Art Biennial in Guatemala (2023), and curated El Patio ABC in Baja California, Mexico (2023–2024).

Previously, he served as the Artistic Director of ZsONAMACO in Mexico City (2020–2023); Associate Curator at the Center for Artistic Residencies at Matadero Madrid (2020–2021); and Research and Symposium Associate for the osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION (2019–2020).

He was the co-founder and co-director of the BAR project residency program in Barcelona (2012–2020) and was a member of the program committee at HANGAR Barcelona (2016–2019). He has curated projects in museums, galleries, and institutions such as MAMM Museum of Modern Art of Medellín; Fundación JUMEX, Mexico City; CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles; TBA-21 Madrid; CRAC Alsace, France; Artissima, Turin, Italy; Centro Cultural de España and Casa Quien, Dominican Republic; Tabakalera, San Sebastián; SOMA, Mexico; and Fundació Miró, Barcelona.

Jennifer Choy (b. 1995) is a curator based in Panama City, Panama. Her research focuses on contemporary art from Central America, the Caribbean, and Asia, and seeks to build an affective cartography between these territories. Her practice engages with questions of memory, the politics of care, and decolonial thought in relation to the construction of identity within diasporic contexts.

She studied Culture, Criticism, and Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and has served as co-director and curator of the independent art space Antítesis. She has also participated in a range of independent writing and curatorial projects across the region. Jennifer currently serves as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama (MAC Panama)