Silverlens is pleased to participate in Art Basel 2025 across three sectors, featuring works by Patricia Perez Eustaquio, Taloi Havini, and Martha Atienza. Across the practices of these artists from the Asia Pacific, we encounter not just representations of economy but artworks that operate within, and against, material systems of valuation. They make visible the social lives of materials long assumed to be mute, resisting their flattening into commodity, even as they circulate within spaces of market exchange.

In the Premiere sector for curated presentations of works created over the past three years, Silverlens exhibits artists Patricia Perez Eustaquio and Taloi Havini, two mid-career artists from the Asia Pacific. Eustaquio creates monumental rope sculptures handcrafted from abacá—a fiber native to the Philippines, also known as "Manila hemp." Nearby, her woven paintings feature swirling fiber compositions that question the hierarchy of materials within the art world. Havini presents a new series of ceramic sculptures based on beroana or shell money, traditionally used in Indigenous Pacific trade systems. Created during her 2025 research fellowship at the Museum der Kulturen Basel—which holds several early examples of beroana—the series response directly to the museum's collection.

For the Unlimited sector, Havini has produced a new edition of her acclaimed installation Beroana (shell money) speaking to her ancestors' usage of sea shells as currency, 18th- and 19th-century examples of which are held in ethnographic collections across Europe. Mimicking the suspended vessels in which beroana are stored, Havini invites us to access a sacred space while protecting Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

For the Parcours sector dedicated to city-wide public art installations, Martha Atienza exhibits a three-channel video at the Tropical Zone, an African food and beauty store down the road from the fair venue. From her TARONG/KAONGKOD series, the piece records the endurance of a boy learning to be a compressor diver. In each inhale and exhale, we witness resilience: a child navigating shifting tides not just of water, but of climate, economy, and power. His breath is not a commodity—it is presence, memory, and resistance.

Visit Silverlens at Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland from 16 to 22 June 2025.

– Sheau Yun Lim

Patricia Perez Eustaquio (b. 1977, Cebu, Philippines; lives and works in Benguet Province, Philippines) is known for works that span different mediums and disciplines—from paintings, drawings, and sculptures, to the fields of fashion, décor, and craft. She reconciles these intermediary forms through her constant exploration of notions that surround the integrity of appearances and the vanity of objects. Images of detritus, carcasses, and decay are embedded into the handiwork of design, craft, and fashion while merging the disparate qualities of the maligned and marginalized with the celebrated and desired. From her ornately shaped canvases to sculptures shrouded by fabric, their arrival as fragments, shadows, or memories, according to Eustaquio, underline their aspirations, their vanity, this ‘desire to be desired.’ Her wrought objects—ranging from furniture, textile, brass, and glasswork in manufactured environments— likewise demonstrate these contrasting sensibilities and provide commentary on the mutability of perception, as well as on the constructs of desirability and how it influences life and culture.

A recipient of The Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards, Patricia Perez Eustaquio has also gained recognition through several residencies abroad, including Art Omi in New York and Stichting Id11 of the Netherlands. She has also been part of several notable exhibitions, such as The Vexed Contemporary in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; That Mountain is Coming at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; and An Atlas of Mirrors in the 2016 Singapore Biennale. Eustaquio will be participating in the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art opening in September 2025.

Taloi Havini (b, 1981, Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea; lives and works in Brisbane, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist working across media from sculpture, photography, moving image, installation, and sound. A descendant from the Nakas clan of the Hakö (Haku) people of northeastern Buka, her research practice is shaped by her matrilineal ties to her land in Bougainville and studies surrounding Indigenous Knowledge Systems and museum collections.

Havini creates immersive and site-specific experiences, often reflecting on ideas of transmission, mapping and representation. She continues to work collaboratively on cultural heritage projects with communities in Bougainville.

Havini won the prestigious Artes Mundi Prize on its tenth edition. Havini’s artwork is held in public and private collections including TBA21–Academy, Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), National Gallery of Victoria and KADIST, San Francisco, CA, USA. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions exhibiting with Artspace, Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; 3rd Aichi Triennial, Nagoya; 8th & 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane; TBA21’s Ocean Space, Venezia; Barbican Centre, London; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand; the Honolulu Biennial, Hawaii; and Artes Mundi 10, Wales. Currently, Havini has a work on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York as part of the reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.

Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Bantayan Island Philippines) is a Dutch-Filipino video artist exploring the format’s ability to document and question issues related to the environment, community, and development. Born to a Dutch mother and Filipino father, Atienza has navigated between these cultures throughout her life, and the oscillation between the two significantly influence her approach to observation, documentation, and the concept of the gaze. Her video is rooted in both ecological and sociological concerns as she studies the intricate interplay between local traditions, human subjectivity, and the natural world. Frequently examining her immediate surroundings, she excels in exploring the potential of art as a catalyst for societal transformation.

She won the Baloise Art Prize in Art Basel for her seminal work Our Islands in 2017. Prior to this, she was twice awarded the Ateneo Art Awards in Manila (2012/2016) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artist Award (2015). Atienza has been selected as one of 12 featured artists in the inaugural exhibition of the Naoshima New Museum of Art, a new platform from Benesse Art Site Naoshima, opening May 2025 in Japan. Recent biennials and triennials include Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024); Diriyah Biennale: After Rain, Diryah (2024); the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2022); Bangkok Art Biennale: Escape Routes, BACC, Bangkok (2020); Honolulu Biennial: To Make Wrong / Right / Now, Oahu, Hawaii (2019); and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2018). Her solo exhibition The Protectors inaugurated Silverlens New York in 2022.