Merv Espina

Merv Espina, Image courtesy of Lauren Villarama.

wsk fm, 2013.

MFI Archival Images, 2017. Image courtesy of KTA Research, Arsenal Berlin.

Spacedumpling, 2024.

Seeing Things, Way of the Forest, 2024. Image courtesy of 421 Arts Campus, Photography by Ismail Noor.

Turmeric at Subflex 4, Image courtesy of Merv Espina, Photography by Arlo Misa.

YT2020 Floorplan, Image courtesy of Merv Espina.

Introduction

Merv Espina pirates, conspires and collaborates to prompt parties, platforms, performances, kitchens, festivals, scents, and soundscapes.

He is a member of Kulagu tu Buvongan, a collective focused on indigenous rights, environmental justice, and ethnography of the Pantaron Mountain Range in Southern Mindanao. Between several projects around food, music, myth, memory, and migration, he also helped run the Southeast Asian sound network Nusasonic (2018-2022), and WSK Festival of the Recently Possible (2008-2019). Collectively and individually, he has exhibited, intervened and performed in ad-hoc and artist-run initiatives, as well as institutional spaces and perennial art events, like the Jakarta Biennale 2015, Yokohama Triennial 2020, and Colomboscope 2024. Co-curatorial work include SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (Tokyo, 2017); Motions of this Kind (London, 2019); Necessary Fictions (Taipei, 2022), and the 9th Asian Art Biennial (Taichung, 2024), and the 1st Pan-Pacific Triennial (Taitung, 2026).

Related Engagement

Discussions

Event #4 - Practicing Beyond the Institution

Across the artworld today we see an increasing number of artists whose practices engage and collaborate with the non-artworld, in spaces with communities beyond institutions of art (such as galleries, museums and biennials.) Bringing together artists whose work engages migration, labour, land, language, ecology, exchange, and collective experiences, this discussion explores how contemporary art moves between institutional frameworks and wider social worlds.

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