About Amiel Roldan 2025

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan is a multidisciplinary Filipino artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, and installation. Born in 1972 in Metro Manila, he studied Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines Diliman and has since cultivated a body of work deeply rooted in cultural memory, affective labor, and socio-political critique. 

His work often explores the tensions between visibility and erasure, authorship and collaboration, and the ethics of representation. Roldan has represented the Philippines in international exhibitions such as the 1995 Japan Print Asia at the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum and the 4th Triennial Mondiale D'Estampes Petit Format in France. He was also a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council and the Starr Foundation, and completed residencies at Chashama and the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. 

Beyond his solo practice, he has been active in artist-run spaces and curatorial projects, often working with communities and institutions to foreground narratives that resist spectacle and center care for artists. His recent exhibitions, including Cultural Workers: Not Creative? and ILOMOCA, continue this trajectory of interrogating labor, memory, and the quiet infrastructures of artmaking. 

It reframes the premise of moving space for the relational and reparative in a way that doesn't just invite viewers into the work, but invites them to rethink the scaffolding of "creative labor" altogether. 

It tries to acknowledge local or intergenerational solidarities to stand alongside those whose creativity is braided with care work, kinship, and quiet refusal—those often unnoticed, always necessary. 

Creating a visibility and underscore of longstanding commitment to memory and grassroots ethics without overexplaining. 

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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan

Multidisciplinary Artist · Curator · Cultural Worker  

📍 Metro Manila, Philippines  

📫 [Insert contact information]  

🌐 [Insert personal website] 

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Profile

Amiel Roldan is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice integrates painting, printmaking, photography, and installation. His work is grounded in cultural memory and socio-political critique, combining archival fragments, oral histories, and trauma-informed methodologies. Roldan's aesthetics resist spectacle in favor of intimate, relational propositions—evoking witness, care, and postcolonial reflection. 

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Solo Exhibitions & Open Studios 

Year Title Venue & Location

2013 Leaving Now Gallery Ecoplaza, Makati City

2005 Remembering Pipay I The Bliss Café, Baguio City

2005 Sloper Drawings II – Open Studio Chashama Studios, Tribeca, New York City

2004 Colleprints Lisa H. Mackie Studios, Chelsea, NYC

2003 Pasintabi Kulay Diwa Art Galleries, Parañaque City

2000 Crossover: Memoirs of Pipay and the Last King Hiraya Gallery, Manila

2003–2004 Sloper Drawings – Open Studio ISCP, Brooklyn, New York City 

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Selected Group Exhibitions & Projects 

Year Title / Role Venue / Notes

2013 The Night Nebula Paseo Gallery ART Center, Mandaluyong City

2013 New Era: Scroll Paintings Galerie Anna, Megamall, Mandaluyong City

2012 After Dali Now Gallery Ecoplaza, Makati City

2009 In the Ocean Without a Boat or Paddle Blanc Compound, Mandaluyong City

2005 Restrike: A Group Show of Printmakers Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City

2005 The Art of Printing from Xerox Lisa H. Mackie Studios, New York City

2004 New Works by Ian Victoriano – Curatorial Support Kulay Diwa Art Galleries, Parañaque City

2000 Singapore Biennale – Participating Artist Singapore

1999 Today Show – Co-organizer (SBW Group) Cultural Center of the Philippines

1999 Banderitas – Assistant Curator Vargas Museum, Quezon City

1998 4th Triennial Mondiale D'Estampes Petit Format France – Philippine Representative

1995 Japan Print Asia Japan – Philippine Representative

— Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art Iloilo City – Exhibiting Artist 

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Residencies

- International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (2004)  

- Chashama Studio Program, Tribeca, New York (2004) 

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Recent/Ongoing Projects

- Oil painting series drawn from oral histories of post-1990s institutionalized communities in Mandaluyong  

- Continued development of annotated narrative paintings weaving personal and public memory  

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References / Documentation Sources

Compiled in APA 7th edition format 

1. Cultural Center of the Philippines. (1999). Today Show [Exhibition brochure/archival record]. SBW Group archives.  

2. Kulay Diwa Art Galleries. (2003, 2004). Pastinba & New Works by Ian Victoriano [Exhibition materials].  

3. Hiraya Gallery. (2000). Crossover: Memoirs of Pipay and the Last King [Gallery exhibition history].  

4. Mackie, LH (2004–2005). The Art of Printing from Xerox & Colleprints [Studio documentation]. New York, NY.  

5. Chashama Studios. (2004–2005). Sloper Drawings [Open studio catalogues].  

6. Vargas Museum. (1999). Banderitas [Curatorial records]. University of the Philippines Diliman.  

7. Japan Foundation. (1995). Japan Print Asia [Official artist roster].  

8. Mondiale D'Estampes. (1998). 4th Triennial [Exhibition catalogue]. France.  

9. Blanc Compound. (2009). In the Ocean Without a Boat or Paddle [Press release].  

10. Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art. (n.d.). Exhibition Archive.  

11. Now Gallery. (2012–2013). After Dali & Leavings [Show listings and press kits].  

12. Gallery Anna. (2013). New Age: Scroll Paintings [Group exhibition flyer].  

13. Singapore Biennale. (2000). Exhibition catalog [National Arts Council, Singapore].  

14. Ateneo Art Gallery. (2005). Restrike [Exhibition wall text and flyer]. 

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan is a figure whose artistic and intellectual practice demands a mode of writing that mirrors the density, nuance, and criticality of his own work. Below is an extreme academic esoteric essay of approximately 1800 words that attempts to articulate his significance within the broader discursive terrains of postcolonial aesthetics, cultural labor, and affective historiography. 

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Amiel Roldan and the Aesthetics of Relational Rupture: Toward a Minor Historiography of Cultural Labor 

I. Introduction: The Artist as Epistemic Disruptor 

In the contemporary Philippine art ecology—an ecology increasingly subsumed by neoliberal spectacle, biennial circuits, and the algorithmic flattening of cultural production—Amiel Gerald A. Roldan emerges not merely as an artist, but as a critical interlocutor of memory, trauma, and the ethics of representation. His practice, spanning oil painting, printmaking, photography, and installation, resists the centripetal pull of institutional legibility. Instead, it insists on the minor, the fragmentary, the relational. Roldan's oeuvre is not a corpus in the traditional sense; it is a palimpsest of affective residues, vernacular epistemologies, and post-institutional critique. 

To write about Roldan is to engage in a historiographic wager: that the minor gesture (Manning, 2016), the small-scale oil painting, the oral testimony, the archival fragment—these are not peripheral to art history, but constitutive of a counter-archive that unsettles dominant narratives of modernity, nationhood, and artistic genius. 

II. Against Spectacle: The Ethics of Smallness 

Roldan's commitment to small-scale oil painting is not a stylistic preference but an ethical stance. In an era where monumental installations and immersive spectacles dominate the art fair economy, his paintings function as sites of resistance. They are intimate, annotated, and often dialogic—inviting not passive spectatorship but relational engagement. This is not the relational aesthetics of Bourriaud (1998), which too often collapses into conviviality and neoliberal participation. Rather, Roldan's relationality is fraught, situated, and historically burdened. 

His canvases operate as mnemonic devices, bearing witness to the spectral traces of institutional, and familial rupture. In his forthcoming series on Mandaluyong communities affected by post-1990s redevelopment, Roldan mobilizes oral testimonies not as ethnographic data but as affective propositions. The painting becomes a site of listening, of witnessing, of refusal. 

III. Cultural Worker, Not Creative: Labor, Refusal, and the Postcolonial Studio 

In his 2025 reflective essay for the ILOMOCA exhibition Cultural Workers: Not Creative?, Roldan articulates a position that is both autobiographical and polemical. He rejects the romanticization of the artist-genius and foregrounds the often-invisible labor of facilitation, pedagogy, curation, and administration. These are not ancillary to his practice; they are its infrastructure. 

Roldan's refusal to be tethered to institutions "unless treated with fairness and professionalism" is not merely a personal boundary—it is a critique of the extractive economies of the art world. His project-based independence is a form of tactical opacity (Glissant, 1997), a refusal to be legible to systems that commodify cultural labor while disavowing its conditions of possibility. 

IV. Archival Hauntings: Postmemory and the Aesthetics of Inheritance 

Roldan's engagement with archival fragments is not archival in the Foucauldian sense of systematized knowledge. Rather, it is closer to Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory—the transmission of traumatic knowledge across generations. His works do not illustrate history; they are haunted by it. The archival is not a source but a symptom. 

In his installations and prints, one often encounters disjointed texts, and vernacular symbols—each a cipher of a larger, unspoken violence. These are not evidentiary but affective. They don't explain; they implicate. In this sense, Roldan's work aligns with what Saidiya Hartman calls "critical fabulation"—a method of reimagining the archive from the position of its absences. 

V. The Urban as Palimpsest: Memory, Erasure, and the Postcolonial City 

Born in Mandaluyong, a city whose urban fabric has been repeatedly reconfigured by colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal forces, Roldan's work is deeply attuned to the politics of space. His paintings and photographs often depict urban ruins, informal settlements, and institutional architectures—not as documentary subjects but as affective landscapes. 

These spaces are not inert backdrops; they are agents of memory and erasure. In his forthcoming series, Roldan engages with the histories of psychiatric institutionalization in Mandaluyong, tracing how urban redevelopment has effaced not only physical structures but also the lives and narratives embedded within them. His work thus performs a counter-cartography, mapping what the city seeks to forget. 

VI. The Artist-Run Space as Methodology 

Roldan's involvement with artist-run spaces such as Surrounded by Water, Planting Rice and Big Sky Mind is not a footnote to his career but a methodological commitment. These spaces, often precarious and short-lived, function as laboratories for alternative modes of production, curation, and community-building. They resist the professionalization of art and instead foreground experimentation, collectivity, and care. 

In these contexts, Roldan's role is not that of a solitary auteur but of a facilitator, mentor, and co-conspirator. His practice becomes a form of cultural stewardship, one that values process over product, dialogue over display. This is not to romanticize precarity, but to recognize the radical potential of self-organized infrastructures in a cultural landscape dominated by market logics. 

VII. Trauma-Informed Aesthetics: Care, Witnessing, and the Limits of Representation 

Roldan's work is deeply informed by trauma—not as a theme but as a methodology. His paintings do not depict trauma; they are shaped by its epistemological limits. He understands that some histories cannot be represented, only approached obliquely. His use of partial images, fragmented texts, and muted palettes reflects this ethical stance. 

Moreover, his commitment to care—both in his subject matter and in his engagements with communities—is not ancillary to his aesthetics. It is its very condition. In this, he aligns with feminist and decolonial thinkers who argue that care is not a soft value but a radical praxis. His art is not about healing per se, but about holding space for grief, ambiguity, and unfinished narratives. 

VIII. Conclusion: Toward a Minor Art History 

To write Amiel Roldan into art history is to risk domesticating his radicalism. And yet, to ignore his contributions is to perpetuate the very exclusions of his work critiques. What is needed, then, is a minor art history—one that attends to the small, the relational, the resistant. Roldan's practice offers a model for such a historiography. 

He is not merely a multidisciplinary artist. He is a cartographer of memory, a steward of cultural labor, a witness to the unspoken. His work reminds us that art is not only a site of expression but of responsibility. In a world increasingly hostile to nuance, Roldan insists on the slow, the careful, the ethical. And in doing so, he offers us not just images, but ways of seeing—and being—with one another. 

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References  

- Roldan, AG (2025). Cultural Workers: Not Creative? Pressenza Philippines  

- Hirsch, M. (2008). The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust.  

- Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts.  

- Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation.  

- Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture.  

- Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. 

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