Untethered gathers six pivotal contemporary Philippine practices: Catalina Africa, Isabel & Alfredo Aquilizan, Is Jumalon, Pow Martinez, Bernardo Pacquing, and MM Yu. Presented by Silverlens from October 2 to 4, 2026, at dusitD2 Davao, the exhibition marks the first time these six practices converge in Davao. Rather than treating distance or displacement as forms of alienation, Untethered considers them spaces of possibility. Across distinct approaches to form and subject, the artists move between the cosmos, disparate terrains, physical matter, and personal histories, suggesting that meaning resides less in fixed coordinates than in the acts of transit, recollection, and making.

Catalina Africa begins this exploration with her Inner Authority Series and Portkey. Her works draw on the atmospheric resonance of Baler, where physical topography gives way to a more elusive visual experience. Functioning as intuitive conduits, and literal portkeys beyond immediate materiality, they translate environmental phenomena and inner landscapes into an ethereal optical vocabulary. Within Africa’s compositions, the boundaries between spectator, ecosystem, and horizon begin to dissolve. Nature shifts from a territory to be surveyed into a threshold: sensed, trusted, and imagined, even as it resists definitive capture.

Where Africa renders terrain weightless, Isabel & Alfredo Aquilizan approach place as an ongoing negotiation of movement and relocation. In Platforms, Version 3 alongside their Dwellings series, #19, #20, #21, and #23 (After From This Place: Project Another Country), the duo uses humble but deeply charged materials, including raw steel, used cardboard, and memory boxes, to construct intricate assemblages. The works frame departure as a quiet homage to communities that build lives in unfamiliar territories, transforming the remnants of transit into the structural foundations of new domestic environments. Through these layered configurations, the Aquilizans develop a tactile language for the unsettled states of identity. Displacement becomes an act of assembly, with residual materials and gathered memories forming the scaffolding of home.

This negotiation of territory takes on a sharper tension in the work of Is Jumalon. In canvases such as High Noon 1 and High Noon 2, Jumalon channels the mountainous terrain of Zamboanga under a harsh, unrelenting light. Her practice inhabits what she describes as a “dual soul,” holding the splendor of her surroundings alongside the presence of peril and conflict. At the zenith of the day, when shadows sharpen and exposure is absolute, Jumalon moves between these opposing conditions with an intuitive fluency on canvas.

Pow Martinez shifts this spatial inquiry toward a deliberate disruption of pictorial convention. In Bad Machine, Doing Time, Finest Hour 4, Finest Hour 6, and the large-scale Local Minority Trance Dance, grotesque and destabilized subject matter meets seductive surfaces and an adventurous chromatic range. Bizarre figures, mechanical dysfunctions, and hypnotic rituals emerge through expressive mark-making. Operating with the logic of a vivid dream, Martinez’s precise orchestration of form and texture unsettles visual expectations, revealing how figuration can locate subversive truths in the more chaotic corners of the imagination.

Bernardo Pacquing grounds these painterly and graphic experiments in the intimate materiality of paper. In his suite of oil works, Painting on Paper #07 through #12, alongside charcoal works including Drawing #02, #03, #05, #06, and #09, he distills the architectural weight of Metro Manila’s urban debris into concentrated gestures on a smaller scale. Filtering influences of Brutalism and Abstract Expressionism, Pacquing allows oil paint and charcoal to bleed, settle, and gather across paper, turning its physical resistance into a study of structure and tension. Informed in part by his connection to Mindanao through the Lubi Art Residency, these works become meditations on decay, restraint, and renewal.

Concluding the sequence, MM Yu approaches reality through color and physical form. In her acrylic canvases titled measures, alongside miniature eave-bound works like if you could hear a pin drop and sculptural paint-laden objects such as untitled pantone, memory becomes an expansive palette where specific hues register as impressions much like light on a photographic plate. Color and paint, whether on stretched canvas or on the physical body of a paintbrush, become the core of the work. Yu selects pigments in response to recollections of a location, scene, or event, translating those remembered tones into a tangible, material language.

Untethered ultimately resists the demand that place make a work legible. Davao is neither a theme nor a convenient frame for producing a regional identity; it is one coordinate among many. What emerges is not a fixed sense of belonging, but a more fluid geography of where we are, where we have been, and where we might find ourselves next.

Multi-disciplinary artist Catalina Africa (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Baler, Philippines) considers shapeshifting to be her primary mode of expression. Working across mediums including painting, sound, sculpture, video, text, and performance, her artworks are invocations to the natural landscape. Resembling spells, songs, love letters, prayers, and maps, her spatial visualization of an environment pays testimony to the Earth’s mysteries and magic. Raised in Manila, the artist now lives and works in Baler, Philippines, along with her husband and child, where she cultivates a devotional practice to Spirit, transmuting Earth song and collaborating with the living land.

Africa’s solo exhibitions include Shrine in the Shape of Shadow, Silverlens, Manila, Philippines (2022); Spiralling in Starlight Vision, ArtInformal, Makati, Philippines (2022); Time Moving in All Directions (Featuring Conversational Adornment by Tanya Villanueva),  Finale Art File, Makati, Philippines (2018). Select group exhibitions include Shrines, Silverlens, New York (2023); Phantasmapolis x Manila: Select works from the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2022); Phantasmapolis, Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2021); Wild Legend, Juming Museum, Taiwan (2015); The Philippines Contemporary: Directions, Metropolitan Museum Museum of Manila, Philippines (2015).

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan (b. 1965 and 1962, Philippines) ground their collaborative practice in personal experiences of global movement, family, and home. Working primarily with everyday, non-traditional materials, the artist duo creates intricate sculptures and large-scale installations that explore themes of identity, migration, displacement, and community. Their works function as metaphors for transience and the human condition.

Their work has been featured in major global institutions, including survey and solo exhibitions at Museum MACAN, Jakarta (Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere, 2023); Japanischen Palais, Dresden (2024); Groninger Museum (2024); Art Gallery of New South Wales (2023); National Gallery Singapore (2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); Auckland Art Gallery (2019); and Centre Pompidou x Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (2018).

The duo has also participated in major international biennials and triennials, including The National 4 (2023), Busan Biennale (2019), Sharjah Biennial (2013), Asia Pacific Triennial (2009), Singapore Biennale (2008), Biennale of Sydney (2006), Gwangju Biennale (2004), and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).

Prominent public and private collections holding their work include Museum MACAN, Singapore Art Museum, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, National Gallery of Australia, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, ILHAM Museum, and the Lopez Museum Foundation.

The artists are based in Los Baños, Philippines.

Is Jumalon is a visual artist whose drawing and painting explore the connection between self and the observed world. Her work delves into overlooked peripheries, delicate provocations, and nuanced metaphors that challenge perception and interpretation. Working across acrylic, oil, charcoal, and pastel, she skillfully manipulates subtle shifts in form and meaning. A graduate of Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines Diliman, she currently lives in Manila. Through her practice, Jumalon investigates diverse forms and dimensions, creating imagery that invites reflection on the boundaries between what is seen and what is felt.

Pow Martinez (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) is a Filipino artist known for his expressionistic style of painting, blending bold colors with demonic, mutant-like characters to create compelling canvases. Often resembling a beautiful nightmare, Martinez combines the mundanities of everyday life with elements of pop culture, resulting in darkly humorous works depicting society’s overconsumption.

Martinez is a recipient of the 2010 Ateneo Art Award for his exhibition 1 Billion Years at West Gallery, Philippines. He exhibits internationally and has worked with different media, from painting to sound. His recent exhibitions include State of Flux at Silverlens New York; City Prince/sses at Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Art Jakarta 2019 with Silverlens and ROH Projects; 50 Years in Hollywood at Pinto Art Museum in New York; Art Basel Hong Kong 2019 with Silverlens; WXXX, West Gallery, Manila. Martinez has also held a number of solo shows in major galleries in Manila, the most recent of which is Pow Martinez (2024) at Silverlens Manila. Early in 2022, Martinez had his first solo exhibition in Madrid entitled Underground Spiritual Unit at Galeria Yusto/Giner.

In 2018, he had a solo exhibition in Indonesia titled Aesthetic Police, as an outcome of his month-long residency program at OPQRStudio in Bandung.

Bernardo Pacquing (b. 1967, Tarlac, Philippines; lives and works in Parañaque City, Philippines and Singapore) is an artist broadening the expressive possibilities of abstraction in painting and sculpture. Incorporating diverse found objects that challenge conventional perceptions of aesthetic representation, form, and value, his work displaces the idea of unequivocal forms, introducing possibilities for the coexistence of affirmations and denials.

He was twice awarded the Grand Prize for the Art Association of the Philippines Open Art Competition (Painting, Non-Representation) in 1992 and 1999. He is also a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2000, an award given to exemplary artists in the field of contemporary visual art. Pacquing received a Freeman Fellowship Grant for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States.

MM Yu has worked between photography and painting since obtaining her degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 2001. Her works in both media tackle the nuances achieved between composition and color as they occupy the frame. Primarily drawn to street photography and documenting the everyday, her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.

The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction. These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.

Yu is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009) Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011/2012). Sovereign Asian Art Prize finalist (2010) and Goethe-Institute-Climate Change workshop grant (2014).

She received her BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant (2007) and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013).