Arianna Mercado

Arianna Mercado is a cultural worker from Manila. She locates her practice across exhibitions, research, and publishing, broadly thinking through ideas of terrain. In 2018, she co-founded kiat kiat projects, a nomadic curatorial initiative that examines sites for exhibition making. Arianna has previously worked on projects with the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, Archives of Women, Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), and British Council, among others. She is co-editor of How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000 (co-edited with Wing Chan and David Morris; Afterall, 2025). Arianna is currently Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman.

Contributions

Southeast Asia | A Global Museum

Tricky Terms, Coming Together: Arianna Mercado, David Morris, and Wing Chan and Carlos Quijon, Jr. in Conversation

In recent years, the practice of the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa has gained exceptional traction in the contemporary art world. The book How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000, published in 2025 maps out the genealogy of the animated and complex ecosystem that ruangrupa has cultivated and which has shaped the trajectory of the group’s practice. Carlos Quijon, Jr talks to the volume’s editors to discuss their editorial processes and considerations.