Dennis Dizon

The MRes Advanced Practices programme takes exhibition-making and staging and flips it upside-down. The programme, instead, focuses on the potential of the curatorial, demanding a critical lens on art theory and cultural studies when transformed as practice. The programme's open, transcultural and interdisciplinary format allows for diverse and necessary perspectives, instilling confidence in research approach, strategy and framework.

As an independent art worker, I am constantly applying and integrating what I've learned in Advanced Practices (Curatorial / Knowledge) into my own research and practice. Currently, I run MATTERS OF, experimenting with audience engagement, participation, and collaboration in institutional public programming via networked digital media.

Most significantly, the programme has taught me to reconfigure positions and rethink encounters with art and culture – both online and offline – never only seeing the object, experiencing the white cube or encountering the black box but always asking what brought me/you/us there in the first place.

To develop my practice further, I have received research grants and participated in artist/curatorial residencies, including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (New York, 2019), Furtherfield (London, 2020) and "Beyond Matter" with Tallinna Kunstihoone (Tallinn, 2020). In 2021, I will be participating in the "Everything Equally Evolved" collective research residency with Onassis Foundation (Athens, 2021), to-be-convened by James Bridle.