Norberto Roldan arrived in Berlin, Germany, at the peak of the winter in January 2024. Having spent practically the entire year until autumn 2024 in that city made him experience the internal melancholy culturally associated with European winters. In the world’s cold regions, winters are associated with nature’s apparent death: plants cease to exist, animals go into hibernation, and the atmosphere is mostly silent. But winter is also a time for rest, resilience and renewal. It is when the Earth regenerates itself, and humans become more contemplative and introspective. This environmental framework is behind Roldan’s exhibition No Winter Lasts Forever, a title he borrows from American novelist Hal Borland. Yet, this personal winter opened new possibilities for his work—a renovation achieved through introspection and a (re)turn to basics, especially thematical and procedural. His studio time in Berlin also became a staggering period of self-reflexivity, a coping mechanism when besieged by the feeling of emptiness.

Berlin’s bucolic atmosphere provided Roldan with frequent visits to flea markets. Over time, these ephemeral museums and repositories of discarded lives, became part of his daily life. The history of flea markets is intertwined with the history of modernity and its creation of the obsolete.¹ On the flip side of discarding is the practice of nitpicking within these (dis)orderly repositories of peoples’ lives and material culture. This practice of selecting dates back to the surrealists, who helped elevate flea markets to a status in artistic practice as the locus where ‘treasures’ can be uncovered by chance. Choosing amidst these archives allows for the reinvention of objects: old photographs, for example, become “unpremeditated slices of the world.”² This act of choosing and reinventing significations has been part of Roldan’s practice for a long time.

Roldan has been a significant figure in establishing contemporary art in the Philippines since the mid-1980s and is a founding member of several collectives and initiatives including Black Artists in Asia (1986), Green Papaya Art Projects (2000), and the VIVA ExCon Biennale (1990).³ While part of the Green Papaya Collective Fellows of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (2024), Roldan did what he always does: he kept his individual practice. So, his wanderings into the flea markets became exercises of nitpicking the material culture that characterizes his practice. This activity of (re)collecting objects from people is the starting point of the works presented in this show.

While in Germany, he reflected on his early days as a Catholic. So, he revisited Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2005), which translates to God is Love, and his installations Erehes (2014), The Rebel (2015) and The Syncretic (2019). The new iterations of these works transport us to a theatre stage, perhaps to symbolize the need to perform and embody the church’s most cherished values: unconditional and self-sacrificing love. From here, he developed a new duo of works that merge religion and politics, both of which on faith rather than on reason—a quality often associated with Germany. A Love Letter from a German Pope (2025) and A Love Letter from a German Philosopher (2025) explore the ideas of Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Marx, two influential Germans who engaged in belief systems based on creed and faith that converted numerous people. Each of these intellectuals, in their way, has inflicted social and cultural change on millions of people.

Order, reason, and method slowly became Roldan’s newly found language. Being an artist with a clean and minimal aesthetic, Germany allowed him to express his desire for warmth, conviviality and gregariousness. The Berlin Journal series, which crossovers three seasons—Spring, Summer and Autumn—articulates his everyday life in an ordered society. The square-shaped compositions contain vintage photographs of regular people and essential places sprinkled with the customary rituals of writing postcards, flying and smoking. These “visual journals” are further contrasted with the Transcontinental Diary (2024) series, a set of four rectangular installations of assembled objects from the flea markets and his trips to Thailand, the United States and the Philippines throughout the year. Artist diaries and sketchbooks constitute important archives of non-linear experiences. These passages by Roldan, which are imaginary, are organized by tones and colors that convey moods; they constitute a laboratory in which he records scenes, visions, stories and meditations.

Travelling to Germany also allowed him to connect his country with global history. He reinterpreted the artwork entitled The Ceremony (2021), which features a masculine figure of international authority holding a sceptre (it’s, in fact, a ruler) and a globe, flanked by two amicable buffalos—one of which is headless. Arriving in Europe, which felt cold, underscored the challenges European explorers faced in search of warmth, ultimately leading them to the Philippines in the sixteenth century. Fortunately, no Winter lasts forever. And while introspection can be a liberating experience, it must eventually come to an end. We can only hope that this re-visitation of his practice and his values yields more positive results.

– Leonor Veiga

¹Rebecca R. Falkoff, Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding (Cornell University Press, 2021), 55.

²Falkoff, 83.

³VIVA ExCon designates Visayas Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference. It started in 1990, and it itinerates the region of Visayas to contradict Manila’s hegemony on arts (re)presentation. It is the oldest artist-led biennial in the world.

Norberto Roldan (b. 1953, Roxas City, Philippines; lives and works in Roxas City) has been a leading figure in the artistic landscape of the Philippines for decades. His installations, assemblages and paintings of found objects, text fragments, and found images address issues surrounding everyday life, history, collective memory, and the ways in which material objects are re- appropriated in another context.

In 1986, he founded the seminal artist group Black Artists in Asia—a Philippines-based group focused on socially and politically progressive practice—and in 1990 he established VIVA EXCON (Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference), the region’s longest-running biennale. Presently, he is the Artistic Director of Green Papaya Art Projects, which he co- founded in 2000. This independent artist-run initiative and alternative art space fosters collaboration and cultural exchange between artists, and remains the longest running independent and multi-disciplinary platform in the country. He graduated with a degree in BA Philosophy from St. Pius X Seminary and took his BFA in Visual Communication from the University of Santo Tomas.

He was represented in several landmark surveys like No Country: Contemporary Art for South/Southeast Asia, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (2013); Between Declarations & Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century, National Gallery Singapore (2015); SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, National Art Centre Tokyo (2017); and, Passion and Procession: Art of the Philippines, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2017).

Leonor Veiga is a curator and art historian based in Montpellier, France. She holds Ph.D. from Leiden University (2018) with the dissertation entitled The Third Avant-Garde: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia Recalling Tradition. The dissertation was awarded the Humanities Best Dissertation Prize, by the International Convention of Asian Scholars (2019). Her curatorial work (2006-23) includes exhibitions in Indonesia, Mozambique, London, Macau and Lisbon. Her writing on the arts (2012-2025) has been published in various books and journals, including Third Text, Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia and Southeast of Now: New Directions of Contemporary and Modern Art in Southeast Asia.