Pristine L. de Leon

Pristine L. de Leon is an independent art critic, researcher, and educator based in Manila. Since receiving the Purita Kalaw-Ledesma prize for art criticism at the Ateneo Art Awards in 2016, she has written art reviews and features as a columnist in The Philippine Star and a contributor to Southeast Asian media platforms such as Art and Market and ArtsEquator. Her fascination with the shape-shifting figure of the art critic led her to become part of the first Asian Arts Media Roundtable convened by ArtsEquator in Singapore in 2019 and of the Critical Ecologies | Critical Anomalies collective, an online residency hosted by Centre 42 in 2021.

Her research interests revolve around participatory and site-specific modalities as well as historiographies of affect and migration. In 2018, she took part in the Curatorial Development Workshop organized by the Philippine Contemporary Art Network, the Japan Foundation and the Vargas Museum, from which she received a grant to curate an exhibition on spatial politics. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Emerging Writers Fellowship organized by Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia,
which published her research on collaboration and public art.

While pursuing her MA in Art Studies: Art Theory and Criticism at the University of the Philippines, she has conducted workshops on writing into art and photography. She is currently a lecturer at the Fine Arts
Department of the Ateneo de Manila University.

Contributions

Southeast Asia | A Global Museum

Roberto Villanueva: The Anomaly of the Artist-Shaman

The performances conducted by the late Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva (1947–1995) prompted the effects and the facture of ritual. In 1989, a sprawling circular labyrinth constructed out of eight-foot runo reeds occupied the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Metro Manila. Inspired by a pattern found in the Cordilleran rice fields of northern Luzon, the labyrinth orchestrated a walk, or dance, toward the center, where one found a circular pit lined with river stones and presided over by totemic figures like the bulul, a carved wooden sculpture representing a guardian spirit. The center was an area resembling a dap-ay, a place for gatherings and rites, traditionally the foundation of Cordilleran learning. Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth, like many of Villanueva’s works, combined installation, chanting, magical invocations, and other ritualistic tropes drawn from Indigenous sources.