Passage
The Eighth Fleet

source: drawingroomgallery
The artist’s activities as husband and wife have long been drawn from collaborative. Evolving within the spheres of family and community, including that which they share with other artist. Their projects have been concerned with keeping the home, finding and defining identity, dealing with hardship of journey, orienting oneself in displacement, sensing presences in absence and accumulating memory. They continue to process these through their relation with the material, object that are both abstract and referential, objects that serve as a metaphor of everyday human life.

Both artists now lives and works in Brisbane with their five children.
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source: acawinfo
Alfredo Juan (born in Ballesteros, Cagayan Philippines in 1962) and Isabel Aquilizan y Gaudinez (born in Manila, Philippines in 1965) are currently based in Brisbane with their five children. The artist couple’s collaborative activities evolved within the spheres of family and community, including personal relationships and those they share with other artists. For years they have been exploring the meaning of ‘home’ and a sense of ‘belonging’ while travelling extensively for work, finding and defining the notion of ‘identity’, dealing with hardships of journey, displacement, sensing presences in absence and accumulating memory. They continue to process these issues through materials and objects that are both abstract and referential, objects that serve as metaphors of everyday human life. For the past ten years they have continuously collected fragments of their protracted Project Be-longing (1997-2007), an artistic collaboration spanning ten years. They are currently working on a new project entitled Another Country that talks about migration, dislocation, diaspora, adopting/adapting, settlement/resettlement, and identity.
The artists have participated in a number of international biennales and exhibitions including the Sharjah Biennale, UAE(2013), Asia Pacific Triennale, Australia (2009), Singapore Biennale (2008), Adelaide Biennale, Australia (2008), Biennale of Sydney (2006), the Third Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, Japan (2006), Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2004), La Biennale de Venezia, Italy (2003) and many others. Currently they are working on the following projects :Yes Naturally, The GEM, PhotoMuseum and Gemeentemuseum the Hague, Netherlands; FRAGMENTS : A Survey, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Australia; New Work/Old Work, Queensland University of Technology Museum, Brisbane Australia:In-Flight III, National Heritage Board, Singapore; Moscow Biennale,Moscow Passing Through: Project Another Country; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan In Habit: Project Another Country; Lake Macquarie Art Gallery, Lake Macquarie, NSW Australia, In-Habit Touring Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia with Museums and Galleries NSW.
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source: mildurapalimpsestbiennale
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan work together as a couple, parents and artists. Though they pursue individual creative vocations, their collaborations dwell on their everyday life within a family of five children. The duty of raising them and the intimacy of ensuring their well-being have come to inflect their work with collective habits, or habits of collection – and also of belonging. In the Philippine setting, where filial ties are extensive, the Aquilizan brood cannot be solitary; it is but part of a community of kin that weaves in and out of the household. Through the years, the home as an abode gathers testimonies of passage: of clothes and toys outgrown, furniture stacked in storage, and other possessions strewn along paths.
Many of Alfredo and Isabel’s projects demonstrate this instinct of collecting as well as the techniques of exposition. They have stayed overnight in a museum and marked its precinct with traces of their residence. They have sought out mementoes from relatives in Australia; shoes, toothbrushes and garbage in Japan; blankets and dreams in Korea; and identification photographs of youth and domestic items in the Philippines. But as home is not singular, so is it not sedentary. Its members wander off and return.
The practice of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan indexes the habit of keeping and investing things with sentiment. It is a disposition shaped by varying desires: as a matter of necessity for a family of five children and as a matter of contingency for artists seeking the intimate contexts of a collective, whether kin or nation, the mass or the global. It is further deepened by their experience as Filipino migrants in Australia and their commissions of installations across the world.
The Aquilizans negotiate identity vis-à-vis tracing points of mobilities. Always considerate of the heterogeneous nature of spaces—a virtue they termed as collaborative—they establish kinship not with place nor people but with the exodus itself. This is the bond that contextualizes their past, present and future projects, irregardless of the constant restructuring of the methods and modes of representation of their artworks—identifying with departures as a poignant tribute to all, like themselves, who have managed to make homes out of strange lands, keeping memories of the passage as the foundation of new dwellings.
Alfredo Juan Aquilizan is an artist of broad sympathies. He draws, paints, sculpts, mixes media, does assemblages, and initiates installation projects. His work heavily draws on memory of home and country. This memory is viewed as a process of recollection, of remembering details and artifacts of a living history of people, places, and encounters. In undertaking this kind of artistic process, he collaborates with the people around him and forges connections among them. In gathering letters, domestic items, mementoes, baby sweaters, toothbrushes, blankets, and photographs of young people for identification cards, he restores the ecology of art as a system of interaction, mutual critique of differences, and the possibilities of the convergence of communities.
Alfredo earned his fine arts degree from the Philippine Women’s University in 1986 and his master’s from the Polytechnic University in Norwich, England. He is currently pursuing his doctorate at the Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Together with wife Isabel, he has exhibited at biennales/triennials like Venice, Sydney, and Singapore and has been commissioned by the Tate Liverpool among others. He taught at the Philippine High School for the Arts and the University of the Philippines at Los Baños.
Isabel Aquilizan is a teacher and artist of the performing arts. She is a director and actress. Her engagement with the process of performance and its inherent collaborative possibilities has led her to work with her husband in installations that cross gaps between media and distances. Her role as a mother of five children enables her to intervene in recreating the art of installation as home or habitat that is sustained by housekeeping, child rearing, nurturing, and the collecting of memories.
Isabel completed her degree in Communication Arts at the Assumption in 1986 and taught at the Philippine High School for the Arts.
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source: dritrivelato
O casal Isabel e Alfredo Aquilizan cria trabalhos que expressam idéias como migração, família e memória. Trabalham com comunidades locais e trazem para a sua obra pequenos objetos pessoais que se transformam em instalações que refletem experiências individuais de deslocamento e mudança.