21AM

21AM—a 21st century contemporary art museum—is established to realize a curatorial brief for the CCP to both follow and lead artists and their publics in their presumably dangerous, likely provocative, but potentially clarifying engagements inside digital space.

The new museum has a particularly Filipino compass. Contemporary Art has been an animated field of cultural production in the Philippines’ archipelagic urban centers during the same half century that the CCP has existed. Recognized as the institution that seeded the mid-20th century Philippine visual arts and performative avant-garde, the CCP has maintained its spirit of collaboration with Filipino artists rethinking art.

21AM is therefore pitched to the future by a CCP that is institutionally cognizant of its history. That history is also widely known for its multiply-faceted past, including the circumstances of its birth within Cold War politics— which has since been, and continues to be, analyzed and metamorphosed by artists. The new museum is expected to pursue this complex criticality, at this time within the deterritorialized “space” of cyberspace.