Artist: Isabel & Alfredo Aquilizan

Ames Yavuz London presents Ellipsis by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, the inaugural exhibition of the new Mayfair gallery at 31-33 Grosvenor Hill.

For over twenty years, Filipino husband-and-wife duo Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan have interrogated the complex intertwined histories of displacement, migration and labour in Southeast Asia. Using materials and tools embedded in the agrarian traditions of the region, the artists present an immersive examination of these themes for their exhibition at Ames Yavuz London.

Ellipsis brings the products and processes of global capitalism to the fore, weaving together stories of production and artisanship typically omitted from history. The exhibition seeks to expose these exclusions using the politics of work, conquest and material lack to reanimate long-muted narratives that lie at the core of daily life in the Philippines and Indonesia. The exhibition is composed of four major projects: a multi-panel pineapple fibre work, a site-specific cardboard installation, a series of new large-scale wing sculptures, and an interactive project comprising 56 crowns crafted from recycled metal.

See/Through is a 16-panel installation of piña cloth – a very fine, lustrous white textile created from the leaf of the pineapple plant, traditionally produced by the indigenous Aklanon people on Panay island in the Philippines. Native to South America, pineapple crops were brought to the Philippines under Spanish colonial occupation 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 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

To create See/Through, the artists worked with a community of embroiderers in Lumban, Laguna Province, a town south of Manila. The monumental installation celebrates the fabric as a material of great beauty borne from indigenous knowledge and craftsmanship, but also as a vessel for conveying complex and contested histories of place. The panels show an embroidered timeline that traces the history of piña cloth and the pineapple from South America to the Philippines, and across the world.

With one sculpture dedicated to each member state, Commonwealth (2024) is an interactive installation comprising 56 tin crowns made from recycled oil cans. Viewers are encouraged 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.

Passage (2025) is a site specific sculptural cardboard installation, designed to welcome visitors through the entrance hallway of the gallery. These cardboard structures form one of the fundamental pillars of the Aquilizans’ practice. In these ‘dwellings’, the artists use makeshift and ephemeral materials to interrogate the fraught questions of home, shelter and community in landscapes marked by migration and displacement. Passage is about arrivals and departures, family, identity and safety, and asks visitors to question how homes are built around human relationships and needs.

Left Wing Project (2024) is an ongoing series of wing sculptures formed from hundreds of hand-forged sickles. While the title is drawn from the intersecting legacies of Communism in South East Asia, the project also 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. Both the knife itself and its associated industries underpin the region’s social structure and economy. The replacement of these hand-forged sickles with cheaper, mass-produced, imported tools has disenfranchised and destabilised communities of artisans. Once powerful knowledge and generational expertise has become increasingly obsolete. The Aquilizans are actively engaged in re-indigenising such practices, and regularly collaborate with local craftspeople on many aspects of their practice.

Special thanks are given to the following collaborators:

Left Wing Project
Blacksmith: Christian Regalario
Baanan, Magdalena, Laguna, Philippines

Commonwealth
Tinsmith: Efren Villanueva
Pinagbayanan, Pila, Laguna, Philippines

See/Through
Embroiderer:
Lucy L.B. Llantos
Lumban, Laguna, Philippines

Weaver:
Raquel Eliserio
Aklan, Panay Island, Philippines