Renan Laru-an (born 1989 in Sultan Kudarat, Philippines) is a researcher. He is the Public Engagement and Artistic Formation Coordinator of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He studies “insufficient” and “subtracted” images and subjects at the juncture of development and integration projects through long-term inquiries, such as Promising Arrivals, Violent Departures, Marawi/Cotabato (ongoing), The Artist and the Social Dreamer, Forecast Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), and Lightning Studies: Centre for the Translation of Constraints, Conflicts and Contaminations (CTCCCs), Hangar/Lopez Museum/TPAM, Barcelona/Manila/Yokohama (2016/2018), among others. He has (co-)curated festivals and exhibitions, including the 6th Singapore Biennale: Every Step in the Right Direction, Singapore (2019); Motions of this Kind, SOAS, London (2019); A Tripoli Agreement, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2018); the 8th OK. Video – Indonesia Media Arts Festival, Jakarta (2017); and the 1st Lucban Assembly: PAMUMUHUNAN (Waiting for capital), Quezon Province (2015). His independent scholarship has been supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and other curatorial fellowships. He edited Writing Presently (PCAN, 2019), an anthology of recent writing on contemporary art in the Philippines. Between 2012 and 2015 he directed the self-organized, multi-disciplinary platform and “virtual” organization DiscLab | Research and Criticism. He lives and works between Sultan Kudarat and Metro Manila, Philippines. 


Laru-an completed a curatorial residency held in 2022 in Prague in the framework of the tranzit.cz / Biennale Matter of Art project Center and Periphery: Cultural Deserts in Eastern Europe, funded by a grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway (EEA and Norway Grants) in the program Culture. The residency resulted in the creation of a new work that was exhibited at the second edition of the In the Matter of Art Biennial in 2022 in Prague.