VENICE.- Jon Cuyson and Mara Gladstone will represent the Philippines at the 61st International Venice Biennale with the exhibition Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig, open to the public from May 9 to November 22, 2026. The Philippine Pavilion is commissioned by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the Office of Senator Loren Legarda.
Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig features work by the Manila-based artist and filmmaker Jon Cuyson. Essential forms from his 30-year practice, including paintings, videos and sculptures, pay homage to the Filipinos who populate our global waterways. The exhibition channels notions of the seafarer, his family, ships and mollusks to centralize the Filipino labor that fuels the monumental movement of global commerce. The exhibition is curated by Mara Gladstone, a California-based scholar and educator.
“I am honored to represent the Philippines on the world’s most prestigious stage for contemporary art,” says Cuyson. “My projects have been shaped through modules of memory – a practice of interconnected works that act as partial archives for submerged histories, maritime labor and fragments of belonging. Our exhibition continues this inquiry by exploring mussels as a motif and metaphor for understanding kinship across land and sea.”
“We are grateful to the PAVB and NCCA for the opportunity to share Jon’s work with international audiences,” says Gladstone. “Developing this project with our Filipino collaborators, from mussel farmers to aquaculture experts, affirms our understanding of waterways as more than pathways to other lands. Water is also a place to find a sense of home. The Filipino story has always been based within the context of travel. Our proposal posits humanizing forces of love within the ebb and flow of globalization in sync with our undulating oceans.”
The exhibition was selected from an open call for proposals on October 5, 2025. The jury comprised Mayumi Hirano (Director of the Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Center, faculty of the University of the Philippines Diliman), Manny Montelibano (media artist, director, and professor at the University of St. La Salle, Bacolod City), and Hon. Victorino Mapa Manalo (Chair of the NCCA and Commissioner of the Philippine Pavilion).
Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig will be the sixth participation of the Philippines at the Biennale Arte since it returned in 2015 with Senator Loren Legarda’s advocacy to affirm the presence of Filipino art and culture internationally.
Jon Cuyson (b. Manila, Philippines, 1969) is a Filipino interdisciplinary artist whose practice exists across installation, painting, sculpture, books and moving images. Rooted in queer and postcolonial ecologies, his work explores the sea as a living archive, an unstable site where memory, labor, migration, and desire continually shift and recombine. Everyday Productions is his platform for experimentation across art, cinema and scenography. His work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe, and the United States, including at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS (London); Times Museum (China); and the Bronx Museum (New York). Cuyson studied at the University of the Philippines, Baguio City and Skowhegan in Maine. He earned his MFA in Painting from Columbia and has held academic positions at institutions in Manila. Cuyson is based in the Philippines, where he continues to live and work.
Mara Gladstone (b. New York, USA, 1977) is a curator and educator committed to creating transdisciplinary, welcoming spaces for art that nurture connections between people and the environment. She has organized exhibitions, public art, programs and publications at Desert X, Palm Springs Art Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum in partnership with community leaders and civic agencies. Prior projects include those with Kelly Akashi, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Gerald Clarke, Gisela Colon, Victoria Fu, Nicholas Galanin, Todd Gray, Pat Lasch, Hung Liu, Karen Lofgren, Wang Qingsong, Adee Roberson, Jono Rotman and Wang Wei. Gladstone holds degrees from the University of Rochester (MA, PhD) and Brown (BA) and is a dual citizen of the United States and the Philippines.
