TAKSU Singapore is honored to present No Empire Lasts Forever, a solo exhibition by Norberto Roldan.

With his new series of oil and acrylic paintings in diptychs, Norberto Roldan continues to compose 'assemblages' of found text and images, juxtaposing past and present, East and West, colonizer and colonized, civilized and primitive, truth and lies, love and hate, war and peace, analog and digital. All text used in the painting were culled from different sources, the most recent excerpt was written almost 40 years ago; whereas the images were grabbed from various online archives with the most recent photo dated 10 years ago. While there may appear to be no connection between the image and text, the mismatch is intentional as these works are neither documentaries nor a historiography but a framework to subvert historical facts and fictions in order to give way to new and accidental narratives.

About the Artist:

Norberto Roldan (b. 1953, The Philippines) took his Bachelor in Fine Arts at the University of Santo Tomas- Manila, and his Masters Degree in Arts Studies Program at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He has been included in two landmark surveys of Southeast Asian contemporary art which were New Art from Southeast Asia 1992 by Fukuoka Asian Art Museum curated by Masahiro Ushiroshoji, Hideki Nakamura, and Arata Tani; and most recently Negotiating Home History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011 by the Singapore Art Museum curated by Iola Lenzi, Tan Boon Hui, and Khairuddin Hori. His works are in the collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, Ateneo Art Gallery, Bencab Museum, Carlos O. Cojuangco Foundation, Patrick Reyno Collection, and private collections in Southeast Asia, USA, and Europe. Norberto Roldan lives and works in Manila.