The University Museum and the Making of the Collective Modern

In conjunction with the NUS Museum’s 70th year anniversary, Professor Patrick Flores will deliver the fourth instalment of the Anniversary Lecture, titled The University Museum and the Making of the Collective Modern. The Lecture carves out a conceptual space for university museums in Southeast Asia—its formation, its project of knowledge-making and pedagogy. Taking the Vargas Museum in the University of the Philippines as a node in this meshwork, it proposes several turns in its formation and speaks to comparative histories across the region, including Singapore. Through the Lecture, Professor Patrick Flores seeks to trace how the modernity of the university intersects with that of the museum amid colonialism, imperialism, and nation-building.

Seating Allocation

Due to limited seating capacity in the Museum’s atrium, where the Lecture will take place, guests will be seated across several gallery spaces. Some seating areas will have restricted or indirect views of the atrium, and the Celadon Room will host a live-streamed screening of the Lecture in real time. Seats will be assigned on-site on a first-come, first-served basis.

About the Speaker:

Patrick Flores is Chief Curator of National Gallery Singapore. He is concurrently Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He has written significantly on Southeast Asian art, specifically its colonial and modernist formations, and has curated contemporary exhibitions on and through Southeast Asia. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017); and The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2023), which he co-edited with T. K. Sabapathy. He was a Curator (Position Papers) at the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019 and Curator of the Philippine Pavilion in 2015 and the Taiwan Pavilion in 2022 at the Venice Biennale. Patrick Flores has previously curated at the Vargas Museum, the National Museum of the Philippines collection, with a series titled Remarkable Collections in the early 2000s, as well as the art collection of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines (CCP) titled Suddenly Turning Visible (2009).

About the Anniversary Lecture Series:

Inaugurated in 2015, the Anniversary Lecture Series is a flagship programme of NUS Museum that brings together scholars, curators, museologists, and creative practitioners. Each Lecture invites its speaker to appraise and speculate on the Museum’s mission as a university museum— an institution for acquiring, housing, and displaying artefacts and artworks, and as an on-campus site for research and knowledge production around cultural and creative practices. Continuing from the previous three Lectures, the Series is expanding towards comparatively and contextually situating the Museum in Southeast Asia and related regions, both historically and in the present.

Across its previous editions, the Series has reflected on the historical moments that shaped the founding of the Museum and the University, as well as the composition of its collections and pedagogical programmes that were initiated in the colonial era and continue to evolve within the postcolonial condition.