Oca Villamiel (b. 1953 Philippines)
Bahay ng Mangingisda
2025 Discarded nylon fish nets 152 x 213 x 152 cm

Oca Villamiel confronts the precarious conditions of life in his hometown of Barangay Caridad, Atimonan, a fishing community marked by poverty and hardship. Bahay ng Mangingisda recreates the scale of a fisherman’s hut from an immense mound of nylon fishnets. Implements for entrapment take the form of protective shelter, conjuring the tension between fragile refuge and the burden of scarcity.

Oca Villamiel (b. 1953 Philippines)
Traces
2022 685.8 x 137.16 cm

Oca Villamiel’s Traces is a haunting collection of 180 framed pieces made entirely of fish bones. On first encounter, the works appear delicate, almost ornamental, but their quiet arrangement carries the weight of lives marked by struggle. Each bone is a fragment of survival, a trace of scarcity. The series speaks to the persistence of poverty: even when the fish is gone, its skeleton remains, reminding us of hunger that has not disappeared.

Pete Jimenez (b. 1960 Philippines)
Hard Rain
2025
Recycled steel shells from historical ordnance
cleaned and rendered safe for artistic display Total 180 pieces installation 14 m length

Hard Rain is an installation composed of more than a hundred rusted steel scrap components from decommissioned WWII artifacts. These inert reclaimed steel casings from historical military equipment, carefully cleaned and rendered safe, were collected over a decade from Nueva Vizcaya and the Ifugao Province in the Philippines. Local villagers unearthed recycled steel shells from historical ordnance and dismantled vessels from WWII-era scrap metal, selling them to antique pickers for modest earnings that often helped meet daily needs.

Through this work, the artist transforms remnants of conflict into a contemplative sculptural field - a landscape where the traces of war are reconfigured into gestures of resilience and renewal. What were once instruments of destruction are now reassembled as symbols of survival, reclaiming material histories through the act of making.

Pete Jimenez (b. 1960 Philippines)
Tall Order 5
2025
Wood and steel, 229 x 61 x 61 cm

Pete Jimenez transforms canoe-like dugouts of Bulakeño fisherfolk into monumental forms in TALL ORDER. Through these weathered vessels, he reflects on our deep reliance on water-both gift and trial-while evoking struggles of survival, adaptability, and co existence. The work also gestures toward tensions in disputed waters, where human resilience confronts poverty, conflict, and the will to endure.

Jimenez’s boats are not pristine relics but weathered, chipped, and blistered vessels, their surfaces bearing scars of use and decay. He sources them from fishing villages in Bulacan and Pampanga, cutting and recomposing fragments into towering sculptures that hover between memory and myth. In this reconfiguration, each dugout becomes a symbolic locus-anchored in community traditions of riverine life yet reaching into broader narratives of territorial claim, ecological precarity, and the invisible currents that bind people to place. His practice, rooted in repurposed industrial and maritime detritus, underscores how cultural resilience emerges from the margins and margins of circulation.

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan (b. 1962, b. 1965 Philippines)
Arrivals and Departures: Project Another Country
2019-2025 Raw metal 100 x 40 cm (each)

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan (b. 1962, b. 1965 Philippines)
Flight/Path
2022 Cardboard and metal Dimensions variable

Yavuz’s artist duo, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan worked on a six month exploration of flight and were commissioned to create two works that utilise the overwhelming scale of Casula Powerhouse. Within the exhibition, there are two pieces of art: a wall installation and a floor painting. Transforming one of the gallery floors into an imaginative tarmac to encourage and stimulate visitors to wonder and experience the excitement of travel.

Elaine Navas (b. 1964 Philippines)
Nothing Moves Itself (After Ling Quisumbing)
2017 Oil on canvas 122 x 610 cm
Commissioning in Process

Elaine Navas’ series of paintings Nothing Moves Itself, inspired from a phrase by theologian Thomas Aquinas, and in dialogue with fellow artist Ling Quisumbing’s photographs, are contemplations on the idea of movement itself. The frozen moment of the sea is apparent in both photograph and painting, yet its motion is unmistakable, as Navas meticulously tries to capture the characteristics of each turn wave, each shift, each gradation to the next recurrence. Rendered in thick layers of paint which have become her signature, each painting becomes a frame from the idea of time-lapse which photography had brought into play. These recorded scenes are revealed to us as depictions of nature; while the transformation from photograph to canvas is a display of the artist's will.

Manuel Ocampo (b. 1965 Philippines)
Oil on Canvas
Commissioning in Process

This series presents paintings currently in development for the ‘Isang Dipang Langit.’ exhibition. Each oil on canvas varies in scale and format, together forming a cohesive body of work.

Manuel Ocampo’s painting philosophy rests on a deliberate clash of the sacred and the profane, using loaded imagery-from Catholic iconography to colonial emblems, swastikas, and cartoon figures-to expose the fragility and corruption of symbols of power. By subverting these icons of authority, Ocampo destabilizes meaning itself, turning reverence into grotesque parody and solemnity into absurd humor. His works resist purity, embracing hybridity and contradiction as a way to mirror the postcolonial Filipino condition: fragmented, messy, and constantly negotiating between Western impositions and local realities.

Deploying an arsenal of art-historical and literary references, religious and popular iconography, Ocampo’s complex paintings weave together various visual vocabularies, creating implied meaning through accumulation and its interrelationships. Presented to viewers in a way that remains deliberately opaque, the symbols and its formal properties that render them - their vivid colours, energetic gestures and course brushstrokes - open up a spectrum of interpretations that defies easy definitions

Russ Ligtas (b. 1985 Philippines)
The Last Hapi
2025 Video installation, Running time: 90 minutes
Dimensions variable

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 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 reference 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.

Dominic Mangila (b. 1978, Philippines)
Manongs of Louisiana
2025 Oil on canvas 200 x 150 cm (each)
Commissioning in Process

The exhibition presents recent paintings by Dominic Mangila that reference Filipino migrant workers who came to the United States in the early 20th century - the farm laborers ‘Manong Generation’ of California’s Pajaro Valley, Hawaii and the shrimp farmers of Louisiana. It also features a six-panel painting which references an archive on International Hotel. The archive is culled from the Watsonville Is In the Hearts (WIITH) - a community engaged research initiative based at the University of Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Dominic Mangila explores the cross-fertilization of abstraction in disparate forms in painting. To prod painting’s other unknown sphere, he explores the reconsideration of the brushstroke as a performative signature of the mind’s interiority and the individual aesthetic gesture of the body’s phenomenological sensitivity to all that is present in the painting studio.

Eisa Jocson (b. 1986, Philippines)
Pasyoke
2020 Video and installation, sound 17 min. 58 sec. Dimensions variable
Commissioned by the Goethe-Institute in the United Arab Emirates

Eisa Jocson’s latest project, the performance-video Pasyoke (derived from Spanish Pasqua for Easter and Karaoke) by The Filipina Superwoman Band, which unravels as an expansion of her body of work around notions of the Filipino singing culture as a state-supported export, mimicry in the music industry, and Snow White and Superwoman as archetypes. The band is an all-female musical ensemble responding to the "Overseas Filipino Musician" (OFM) phenomenon in clubs, bars, hotels and cruise boats throughout Asia and the Middle East. A cross between contemporary dance and music video, Pasyoke merges genres, combining Pasyón, a 16th-century epic Biblical narration of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, with Bidyoke - karaoke gatherings customary in the Philippines for celebrations. The project was conceived as a research project that would have seen Eisa Jocson spending time as an artist-in residence in Dubai. These plans were thwarted by the pandemic and the little research that was still possible was done remotely, while the production took place mostly in the Philippines instead of the UAE.

Leeroy New (b. 1986, Philippines)
Bird Nests
2025 Bamboo, recycled plastic and found objects assembled Size variable

Leeroy New’s bird nest-inspired installation sculptures are notable for transforming everyday discarded materials into complex, biomorphic forms that evoke the creative ingenuity of avian nest building, while addressing environmental and social themes. These works often feature organic, swirl-like structures made from recycled plastics, electrical tubing, and hardware sourced objects, combining art, social commentary, and ecological consciousness.

Leeroy New reimagines the methodologies of birds in collecting nesting materials by foraging and assembling local, found objects such as plastics, irrigation hoses, and cable ties into large-scale installations. Like birds who use leaves, bark, and fibers, New draws parallels between natural and human-made materials-his sculptures often become “time capsules” containing both cultural and environmental narratives. The forms echo nests and root systems, referencing the Balete tree in Southeast Asia, and invoke themes of resourcefulness often found in Filipino communities who repurpose leftovers into decorative objects.