In this new sculptural installation, Catalina Africa transforms the gallery into a world where flowers tower over us, shadows harden into shrines, and raindrops shimmer as thresholds between earth and sky. Combining cement, resin, feathers, fabric, mirrors, and tarpaulin, she creates four human-scale figures anchored by a floor element shaped like roots or flames. Together, they form what she calls her “personal cosmology”—a landscape of spirits drawn from memory, meditation, and her sitio.

Africa’s work emerges from a long practice of painting landscapes that “speak back.” Here, she expands that dialogue into three dimensions, asking how the body feels awe in the presence of scale, light, and material contradiction. Flowers are no longer small and delicate but monumental; industrial cement carries water; synthetic glitter refracts natural light. These paradoxes embody the artist’s belief that nature is a teacher and that reconnecting with earth begins with wonder.

Rather than prescribing a narrative or ritual, Africa invites viewers to wander freely through the installation. Her aim is simple yet profound: to evoke feelings of magic, inspiration, and kilig. The installation is not a fixed story but a portal—a reminder that imagination can be an act of stewardship.

Denver Garza’s installation invites us into an unfinished monument of care. Using stretched canvas, fabric, and an accumulation of everyday keychains, Garza creates a participatory sculpture that grows with the audience. Visitors are asked to contribute: to inscribe a burden on a red paper tag, to leave it behind, and to tie a keychain to the structure.

The form that emerges is not God, but a god—an imagined being that carries collective hope. Garza draws on memories of childhood devotionals, queer identity, and his past as a mental health worker, weaving ritual and therapy into a practice of communal release. The work resists the exclusivity of the art market by embracing the mass-produced keychain, transforming it into a vessel for personal reflection.

More than an object, the piece is an encounter. Each gesture—small, repetitive, and vulnerable—accumulates into a collective body. In this way, Garza’s work blurs the line between art and care, sculpture and ritual, personal memory and public offering. As Nicolas Bourriaud reminds us, art can operate as “a state of encounter,”¹ and Garza embraces this condition—where process, not permanence, becomes the ground of hope.

Russ Ligtas’ The Last Hapi is an exploration of identity, memory, and myth, framed as both a ritual and a self-portrait. Drawing from his experience as a Filipino navigating diaspora, Ligtas weaves together fragments of history, personal narrative, and cultural imagination to question what “Filipino-ness” might mean today.

The work unfolds as a hybrid: a film that is also a ritual, a performance that becomes an installation. At its center is stillness—an insistence on breath and silence in a world crowded with noise. The presence of a seated figure within the space, watching alongside the audience, transforms viewing into an act of reflection and mirroring.

By referencing 1972, the year Martial Law was declared in the Philippines, the piece gestures toward historical trauma while refusing to fix meaning. The Hapi’s disappearance may serve as metaphor, allegory, or simply myth. In this way, Ligtas leaves room for multiple readings—academic, political, or personal.

The installation space, envisioned as either a dark cinematic environment or an intimate living room, invites audiences into a porous bubble of contemplation. Here, Ligtas offers not answers, but a mirror: a chance to see ourselves in contradiction, and perhaps to find grace in the reflection.

Ella Mendoza’s installation explores the psychology of cognitive dissonance—the tension of holding contradictory beliefs while refusing to reconcile them. Her forms evoke flesh, bone, and relic, yet never fully declare themselves. This ambiguity mirrors how societies absorb violence: through abstraction, compartmentalization, and silence.

At the center, a lamb on a clay brick plinth recalls religious sacrifice. But instead of redemption, it offers accusations. Around it, ropes descend in a triangulated array, suggesting both divine light and constriction. Chalk outlines trace absence like crime scenes, forcing the viewer to confront aftermath rather than spectacle.

Enclosed in graphite-gray walls, the space becomes a chamber of suspended judgment. Silence here is not neutral but charged, demanding that viewers notice their own reflexes of denial. Hal Foster’s discussion of abject and traumatic art shows how representation can fail not because of deficiency, but because it must reckon with the unassimilable. 

Mendoza’s work does not offer answers. Instead, it stages the mechanisms by which we justify, compartmentalize, and live alongside violence—whether in faith, politics, or everyday life. In doing so, it asks us to reflect not on what violence is, but on how we manage to endure it.

Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan turns to the ordinary: spoons, jars, fabrics, brooms, coins. She gathers these into typologies that resemble catalogues and inventories, but instead of sealing objects into fixed meaning, she keeps them unsettled. A spoon beside a reliquary, a broom beside a colonial coin—the pairings resist hierarchy, suggesting another way of telling who we are.

Her installation takes the form of a long scroll, a surface that unfurls across the wall and table. Unlike framed prints, the scroll refuses finality. It behaves like memory—expansive, fragile, always being rewritten. Printmaking here is less about repetition than about variation; each impression registers a shift, a small rupture in the familiar.

Pagkaliwangan interrupts the canon of “Filipino motifs,” inserting anomalies and distortions that reveal how unstable history remains. The colonial gaze lingers in our taxonomies, yet her work redraws them into something more provisional, more alive.

Critic Hal Foster has described the “archival impulse” as the artist’s drive to reprogram fragments of the past into new forms. Pagkaliwangan follows this path with tenderness, creating an archive that breathes.

What she offers is not resolution but becoming—an identity still in sketch, still unfolding.

Star Eater, Soil Healer: Notes on Phytoremediation by Issay Rodriguez invites viewers into the hidden magic of plants and the regenerative possibilities of soil. Inspired by the rare Philippine species Rinorea niccolifera, which absorbs toxic nickel and restores ecosystems, Rodriguez transforms scientific observation into poetic visual narratives.

The exhibition’s study station includes drawings, cyanotypes, and motion graphics that reveal the plant’s capacity for transformation. Ambient whispers and soft poetry encourage reflection, curiosity, and slow engagement with the unseen processes of life beneath our feet. Visitors are invited to participate, linger, and form their own narratives about ecological resilience.

Rodriguez challenges conventional hierarchies of knowledge. Scientific documentation and artistic poetics coexist, and classification becomes a gesture of care rather than control. The exhibition fosters wonder, encouraging audiences to notice what is often overlooked and to participate in the quiet work of attention.

Star Eater, Soil Healer is a meditation on observation, care, and ecological responsibility. Through this work, Rodriguez shows that attending to the world, with curiosity and imagination, is an act of healing—both for the soil and for ourselves.

Untitled (Structures) pair iron sheets with their painted twins. Each groove, dent, and reflection carries time. Luis Antonio Santos captures the ordinary and lets it linger. Light shifts, shadows move, and the familiar becomes uncanny.

The diptych freezes an instant; the sheets continue to age, to reflect, to respond to the environment. The smaller Form/Void works isolate space and absence, inviting contemplation. Dim, quiet, almost altar-like, they draw attention to the unseen, the overlooked, the liminal.

Viewers are asked to look slowly, to notice subtle shifts. Boundaries between object and painting, form and void, past and present, blur. Everyday materials—the ubiquitous yero—become vessels for reflection, memory, and impermanence.

This exhibition encourages attention. Each encounter is unique. By noticing, we participate; by pausing, we inhabit space. Untitled (Structures) asks us to consider the quiet resonance of the familiar, the layered histories of material, and the delicate poetry of the everyday.

Bodies become stars, gods, memory.

In this three-part video installation, Joshua Serafin and collaborators reclaim what empire sought to erase: the sacred, shifting selves of precolonial gender-diverse identities in the Philippines.

Each screen offers a myth in motion:

PEARLS flows with ancestral femininity, a dance of song, liquid light, and ritual gesture. Creation Paradigm conjures celestial beings emerging from dark waters, a rebirth of deities for a new age.

VOID enacts a ritual of transformation, where body, spirit, and soil merge, creating a bridge between the earthly and the divine.

These works are acts of remembering, refusing erasure, and imagining futures. Collaborators’ movements expand, complicate, and queerness the narrative of identity and divinity. Sound, movement, and visual rhythm guide, disturb, and envelop the viewer, inviting reflection on the fluidity of time, spirit, and self.

Here, divinity is mutable. History is felt in flesh. Queer and trans bodies do not merely ask for space—they take it, beautifully, insistently, and undeniably.

Jel Suarez’s cutouts gather quietly along the wall, each a fragment of life suspended in clear acrylic. She calls them “specimens,” though they are neither scientific nor cold—they are small records of care, memory, and attention. Born from her mother’s illness, childhood experiences of labeling objects in her grandmother’s pawnshop, and years of collecting fragments from books and collages, these works transform the ordinary into something intimate and resonant.

The acrylic catches light and shadow, folds and overlaps, creating layers that both conceal and reveal. Each piece invites careful looking, a pause, a moment of reflection. Arranged in a grid, the fragments create a rhythm that comforts while leaving space for wandering, for discovery. There is no single story here—only traces, whispers, echoes of domestic labor, archival practice, and acts of care, preserved in material form.

Suarez’s specimens ask us to notice the small gestures: the cut, the fold, the layering of fragments. Ordinary materials, when attended to with tenderness, carry weight and meaning. In this quiet insistence, we find intimacy, resilience, and memory made visible—a meditation on how the fragments of our lives, carefully observed, can speak to the universal.

Some disappearances are loud—broadcast, mourned, historicized. Others happen slowly, almost silently. Vanishing Tribe draws attention to the quiet violence of erasure.

In this work, Derek Tumala places side by side two vulnerable forms of life: endangered species and artists—queer, women-identifying, Filipino. The two-channel video alternates between taxidermied animals inside the National Museum of Natural History and portraits of living artists who, like those animals, survive within systems that threaten their existence.

It is not a simple metaphor. The parallel is material, embodied. What connects these vanishing lives are the legacies of colonialism, environmental collapse, hypercapitalism, and policies that privilege profit over life. The extinction of animals and the precarity of artists are not isolated tragedies; they are symptoms of the same world order.

Tumala does not offer spectacle—he offers pause. A space to reflect on who gets archived and who gets forgotten. Who is protected by institutions, and who is left to fend for themselves.The act of gathering, making visible, insisting on presence, becomes a quiet protest.

Pay attention. What vanishes does not always return.

Vien Valencia’s Long Drawing begins with a simple act: chalk and/or crayon pressed to the ground, feet moving forward, a line left behind. Yet this mark is more than a drawing—it is a record of displacement.

As a child, Valencia notices that his school ID’s carry a new address. His family moved constantly, pushed by eviction and survival. What seemed temporary became a cycle of uprooting. Chalk and crayon, like memory, is fragile: it can be erased, smudged, paved over. Still, each line carries the weight of a journey, of bodies in search of permanence.

Unlike traditional drawings on pristine paper, Valencia chooses the streets—overlooked, burdened, humble—as his picture plane. To draw his path from current home to previous, honor the movement itself, to trace an archive of survival across city streets.

The imagined distances and connections of Long Drawing would exceed any gallery wall. What you encounter here is a video installation that gestures toward the impossible scale of displacement. Valencia’s work is not about nostalgia but about grounding—asking what it means to belong when belonging is always at risk.

Liv Vinluan’s watercolors are acts of fragility and remembrance. Returning to the nineteenth-century volume Flora de Filipinas, she reimagines its colonial botanical illustrations as hybrid forms—plants that are extinct, endangered, or conjured from fragments of memory. These works are not attempts at scientific precision, but elegies: records of what has been lost and what still haunts our ecological imagination.

Her choice of watercolor is deliberate. Long used by botanists for field study, the medium’s transparency and unpredictability embody the fleetingness of life. Each mark becomes a gesture of both taxonomy and entropy—an attempt to catalog, even as the form dissolves. For Vinluan, this fragility is not weakness but truth.

The installation presents these works at waist height, accompanied by magnifying lenses and notes resembling epitaphs or post-mortem reports. Viewers are invited to linger, to scrutinize, and to mourn. By framing her images as a “quiet resistance” and a “mourning archive,” Vinluan asks us to reckon with the violence of extinction, the colonial legacies of classification, and the inevitability of change.

Her watercolors remind us that beauty can exist in what fades, and that the act of noticing—slow, tender, attentive—is itself a radical gesture of care.