ALFREDO & ISABEL AQUILIZAN

What themes do Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan’s artworks focus on?

The Aquilizan’s work usually comprises sprawling cardboard box installations or personal artefacts that speak to the transience of human endeavour and place-making. Their itinerant works, developed over years of working abroad, address the practicalities of making do and parenting, as well as the fractured social identities that result from human resettlement.

The Aquilizans’ art delves into:

• Migration and Diaspora: Reflecting their own experience of moving from the Philippines to Australia in 2006. They returned to the Philippines in 2024.
• Community and Belonging: Exploring how people create homes and relationships in new environments.
• Memory and Displacement: Using personal artifacts like balikbayan boxes to symbolize emotional connections to home.
• Sustainability: Repurposing materials like cardboard to create their installations.

What Are Some of Their Notable Projects?

Project Be-Longing (1997–present)

In 2006 the couple migrated with their five children to Brisbane, where they would live until 2024. In doing so, the Aquilizans’ journey became a metaphor for the displacement of all migrant families. ‘Project Be-Longing’ (1997–present) is an exemplary open-ended work taking the form of balikbayan boxes arranged with personal clothing, books and possessions that are used by the Filipino diaspora to transport goods.

In the cargo-ready balikbayan boxes of ‘Project Be-Longing’, personal histories undergo radical compartmentalisation and detachment. Project Be-Longing: In Transit (2006) presented the artists’ family’s own belongings unmoored during their move from the Philippines to Australia, embodying the emotional and spiritual longing for home that connects individuals to their roots.

In-Habit (2012)

Inspired by the precarious livelihoods of the minority Badjao people, In-Habit: Project Another Country (2012) asked local Australian communities to contribute makeshift cardboard houses to a miniature village. The seafaring Badjao, who live across the Sulu Archipelago in fragile stilt houses and whose lifestyle rejects notions of citizenry, sovereign states, and capitalist economies, reflects Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s interest in community-building, interdependence, and connectivity.

The resultant topography of In-Habit, with its inverted mountains reminiscent of favelas or Badjao Torosiaje, share in the vernacular of the displaced, binding viewers together in the process of meaning-making.

Passing Through (2017)

A participatory project inviting visitors to create cardboard boats, emphasising community collaboration.

Bound (2024)

Their first major public art commission, the six-metre bronze sculpture Bound (2024) depicts a vessel made from 85 pieces of luggage tied with rope. Bound, permanently installed at Sirius Sydney in The Rocks, symbolises the history and universal narratives of the historic neighbourhood.

How does the duo incorporate community participation into their projects?

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan frequently invite local communities to contribute to their installations, fostering collective creativity and shared narratives.

In March 2025, the artists called upon visitors to Bundanon Art Museum to add their own cardboard sculptures and drawings to the installation Reflections/Habitations (2025). Part of the museum’s group exhibition Thinking Together: Exchanges with the Natural World, the project continues the Aquilizan’s ongoing engagement with ideas of home and family.

Where Have they Exhibited Their Work?

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan has held solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, including:

• Museum MACAN, Jakarta (Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere, 2023)
• Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan: See/Through, 2021)
• Auckland Art Gallery (From Pillars to Posts: Project Another Country, 2018)
• Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (In-Habit: Project Another Country, 2016)

Their group exhibitions include:

• The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2025, 2009, 1999)
• Bundanon Art Museum, New South Wales (Thinking Together: Exchanges with the Natural World, 2025)
• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter, 2022)
• Sharjah Biennale (2013)
• Biennale of Sydney (2006)
• Singapore Biennale (2008)
• Gwangju Biennale (2004)
• The Venice Biennale (2003).

Their works have also been displayed in museums across Japan, Australia, and other countries.

Ocula | 2025