Vordemberge-Gildewart Scholarship 4.0

Museum Weisbaden
26 Sep 25 — 30 Nov 25

Since 1983, the Switzerland-based Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation, together with a European exhibition venue, has awarded a scholarship worth 60,000 Swiss francs to artists up to 35 years of age from the respective region. The group exhibition "Stipendium 4.0" curated for this occasion forms the basis for the selection process by an independent international jury. This marks the fourth time, following the years 1997, 2004, and 2012, that Museum Wiesbaden has been the venue for one of the world's most important scholarships for emerging artists. 

Augustine Paredes is the winner of Vordemberge-Gildewart Scholarship 2025

Prior to his residency at MMCA Goyang, Augustine Paredes began a long-term artistic research spanning Germany, South Korea, Philippines, and the United Kingdom, tracing photographic archives, literature, and documents while engaging with scholars and fellow researchers. 

For the Vordemberge-Gildewart Scholarship Exhibition at Museum Wiesbaden, the artist presented new works on the atrocities endured under colonial forces during the Pacific War.

Darlings Between Fires are layered oil paintings with piña fabric and table doilies, presented as outputs of the artist’s ongoing research on the post-colonial Filipino identity. The images are based on archival photographs of Filipinos in Mindanao during the Pacific War, when Japanese immigrants lived alongside locals. Historically, photographs are considered factual evidence. This ongoing research continues to suspect photography as a historical truth-teller, as documents demonstrate certain biases. The Japanese archives depict harmony and coexistence, while American soldiers’ images reveal brutality and atrocity, while journals and collected mementoes of Filipino prisoner Conrado Gar Agustin offer personal fragments. These conflicting accounts expose recorded history as partisan and varying. The series embraces this tension, weaving delicate truths into complex images of memory.

Glory is a sculpture that draws parallels between the photo booth and the confessional booth, continuing an inquiry into religion and photography as instruments of biased truth. As its surface bears smearing traces of opaque materials, its typology transforms intimacy into a tense power dynamic. In Glory, the camera transforms into a god and the subject into a sinner, eventually allowing space for submission and salvation, absolution and penance.
Augustine will further expand into other colonies in Southeast Asia and the archive collections in the United States, widening the scope of dialogue around fractured and contested histories.