Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art on the South Bank of the Brisbane River
The sixth exhibition in the Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art series will occupy the entire Gallery of Modern Art as well as the iconic Watermall and adjoining galleries at the Queensland Art Gallery.
APT6 will include the work of more than 100 artists from 25 countries, including collaborations and collectives, which reflect the diversity of practices across Asia, the Pacific and Australia.
From the Philippines, there will be a sculpture by the husband-and-wife team of Isabel & Alfredo Aquilizan who live and work in Brisbane.
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan create works that use the processes of collecting and collaborating to express ideas of migration, family and memory. Often working with local communities, the Aquilizans bring together personal items to compose elaborate, formal installations reflecting individual experiences of dislocation and change. Recent works have used the form of balikbayan crates, which Filipino migrants use to transport belongings, as moulds for room-sized constructions made of clothing and other personal effects.
For APT6, the Aquilizans will produce an enormous suspended sculpture titled In–Flight (Project: Another Country) 2009. The work takes the shape of an aeroplane, constructed from hundreds of small handmade planes. This aggregation of tiny sculptures, created by children and adults from found objects and materials, will be added to during the course of the exhibition. Having migrated from the Philippines to Australia, the Aquilizans’ work reflects personal experience, while conveying points of exchange and communication that extend beyond borders.
The text above is taken from the APT6 website at http://qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/coming_soon/apt6 and the image of In–flight (Project: Another Country) is reproduced with permission.
For the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT3) in 1999 the Aquilizans produced an installation comprising salt, household items, mementos, steel construction, scent of sampaguita flower and sound called Project be–longing #2 1999 to which they added these descriptions of each other.
Isabel’s statement:
“His name is Alfredo Juan Aquilizan. He is my husband, a father, a teacher and an artist (in that order). He is also a painter and he has a special talent of changing diapers as well as mixing milk with water. One of his pre-occupations is bringing his children to school. He hates attending Parent-Teacher meetings — though he thinks it is necessary for it is also the source of his ideas. He likes to work with readymades for his installations, since it helps him save time — so he can devote more to his family. He likes to make objects, things he can play with his children and at the same time can be hanged on museum walls. He thinks those objects are important since these are metaphors of his existence.”
Alfredo’s statement:
“She is a mother, a teacher and an artist. She used to do a lot of theatre work but she thinks that home making is more important at the moment. She has a special talent in cooking as well as mending “hand me down” children’s clothing. She really likes going to the market for she thinks this is the all providing pot of materials as well as concepts. She also has various talents such as choosing the best stringbeans simultaneously soliciting art ideas from vendors. She says that most of the best performance she did was done in such places. Her name is Isabel, the performer, the mother of my children, my wife and my co-operator.”
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