Ames Yavuz opens its new London gallery with a thought-provoking exhibition of Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan’s work

Based in Australia for a long time, the couple maximised their holiday in the Philippines by spending time with their children and their respective families while researching on textile production, for which they received a grant from the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia.

Looking into the pineapple fibre production and processing in Aklan, the couple had to stay in the country as the pandemic put the world on hold. In establishing rapport with the farmers, the Aquilizans continued to seek other artisan communities as the lockdown gradually eased, primarily motivated by the reality that many of these communities are from dwindling industries. This led to their discovery of a panday [blacksmith] in Magdalena, Laguna.

The artists, with the support of Ames Yavuz gallery, mounted a benefit show in Singapore soon after, featuring metal masks and a sculptural piece that seems like a trophy. Proceeds from the exhibition helped the Aquilizans expand their project, building more workshops and equipping artisans to do more commercially artistic works. Eventually, they found a tinsmith in Pila, Laguna, and also continued the fibre project with an embroiderer in Lumban, Laguna.

Spanning around three years, the Aquilizans deem their new trajectory in their community-based practice as the highlight of their Ellipsis exhibition.

“Beyond the visible works are the engagements that we’ve had with these artisan communities. It’s not really about producing artistic works, but the idea of this project is to create a space for the community to come together,” explains Alfredo.

Creating interactive and engaging spaces for discourse is at the footing of the Aquilizans’ artistic practice. But deciding to permanently return to the Philippines and be involved with these communities led to the deepening of their understanding of the plight of these craftspeople and reinvigorated desire to make a transformational impact on these dying industries to the best of their abilities.

Visitors were welcomed in the gallery by the Aquilizans’ site-specific sculptural cardboard installation, Passage, a 2025 iteration of their distinctive cardboard structures of ‘dwellings’. Here, the artists used makeshift and ephemeral materials to interrogate the fraught questions of home, shelter and community in landscapes marked by migration and displacement. Passage speaks of arrivals and departures, family, identity and safety, and raises the question of how homes are built around human relationships and needs.

Upon entering the inner sanctum of the space, visitors find a sculptural piece of wings made of hand-forged sickles hanging from the ceiling to the floor. Part of their ongoing series that was also featured in the recent Art Fair Philippines, the Left Wing Project draws inspiration for its title from the intersecting legacies of Communism in Southeast Asia. The project asks questions about the contemporary agrarian realities of the region and the politics of the production line globally. The Aquilizans began looking at the wing as a way to connect to craftspeople and community: in the case of the sickles, local artisans once produced these using inherited skills, and passed the handcrafted tools on to future generations as a family heirloom. The replacement of these hand-forged sickles with cheaper, mass-produced, imported tools has disenfranchised and destabilised communities of artisans.

On the wall is an installation comprising 56 tin crowns made of recycled oil cans, dedicated to each member state of the Commonwealth of Nations. Aptly titled Commonwealth (2024), the interactive installation encouraged visitors to handle the crowns and try them on in front of a mirror, inserting themselves into the grand narrative of monarchy and the legacies of imperial power.

The exhibition space ended with a monumental installation celebrating the piña fabric embroidered by the artisans of Lumban, Laguna. Besides being a material of great beauty borne from Indigenous knowledge and craftsmanship, the fabric is also a vessel for conveying complex and contested histories of place. Titled See/Through, the 16-panel installation shows an embroidered timeline that traces the history of piña cloth and the pineapple from South America to the Philippines, and across the world.

Piña is a very fine, lustrous white textile created from the leaf of the pineapple plant, traditionally produced by the Indigenous Aklanon people on Panay in the Philippines. Native to South America, pineapple crops were brought to the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule in the 17th century. Chiefly made for export, the cloth is known locally in Tagalog as nipis, meaning ‘thin’ or ‘fine’, and was highly sought-after by the European elite for handkerchiefs, petticoats and the like during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Serving as a punctuation mark to the exhibition’s messaging, See/Through weaves the narratives of each project featured in the show, shedding light on the contemporary realities facing these industries while also reminding visitors of their colonial and capitalist origins. 

“The relations that were forged and created, the sharing, the moments, the time that we all spent together and slowed down... I think that’s what art is all about,” shares Alfredo.

During the three years spent in the workshops, including Left Wing Project’s early beginnings in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the Aquilizans clarified that the output or a concrete visualisation of the exhibition was last on their minds, for the process of art-making and community development was paramount.

“We were just going with the flow,” describes Isabel. “That has always been our process—immersing ourselves and understanding what’s really going on in the communities.” The artist calls it pakiramdam or feeling, where sensitivity and empathy spontaneously lead them to their outputs.

True to the show’s title, the exhibition is foreseen by the artists as something that would continue to evolve—“it’s very organic, just like a blank canvas, and we just see where it leads us,” Alfredo continues. “In our practice, we’re not really producing objects for an exhibition or an exposition. We create things for us to have a medium for people to come together and impart our sentiments over relevant issues.”

As educators, formerly at the Philippine High School for the Arts and later in other avenues that allow them to impart their knowledge and experience, such as workshops and residency programmes, the Aquilizans find their projects to be tools of teaching as well. In these spaces with the communities they collaborate with, there is a reciprocal exchange of knowledge and organic building of connections and deepened relationships.

“When you start to connect and understand what’s really going on in these artisan communities, it extends to what is happening in our society, in our surroundings,” shares Isabel.

How the finished works are received locally and internationally, how audiences engage with these pieces and find meaning and resemblance to them, are some of the things they always look forward to sharing with their communities.

“So the narratives continue to evolve, and also conversations in the economic, political and cultural contexts about these artisan communities begin,” continues Isabel.

One of the threats facing these artisan communities, the Aquilizans share, is the mindset of the current generation.

“People were just there, waiting and hoping,” says Alfredo. “We thought of creating this space to draw more people in those communities and open their eyes to the possibility of becoming more self-sufficient,” he continues.

Seeing how these artisan communities teem with so much potential and yet are dependent and inferior towards their patrons is something the Aquilizans wish to enlighten.

“When you’re not capable of doing anything, you feel trapped by someone who is in power,” explains Isabel. “And the irony is when you become self-sufficient, the government realises you can provide for yourself and hence do not need any more assistance.”

In their initial encounters, many of the communities the artist-duo collaborate with choose to abandon their age-old, labour-intensive artisanal traditions because of the immediacy and ease of financial assistance they received from the government. Hence, they felt the need to exert more effort in reviving these traditions and also showing the people numerous paths of success they can achieve from it.

Another threat is the machines available and accessible today that help other parts of the agrarian sector much faster, hence limiting the requirement for the services of a blacksmith.

“So we try to find other means or other ways to resolve this dilemma in supply and demand to help these artisans sustain their heritage practice,” shares Alfredo.

Semiotically critiqued, the artworks of the Aquilizans open further conversations about labour, capitalism, colonialism, and even contemporary issues concerning the agrarian sector. Through Ames Yavuz, which has roots in Singapore and Australia, they can raise these Asia-Pacific conversations in dialogue with histories and cultural contexts present in the global and Eurocentric arena.

“We hope to offer triggers or questions, especially at this time and age, where we have to bring back the ecology or the importance of art in society amidst its commercial tendencies,” the Aquilizans jointly conclude.

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