Confabulations: 
A Fantasy of the Real
Gajah Gallery, Manila

An inaugural exhibition carries particular weight—it declares intent. Gajah Gallery Manila's opening show, titled "Confabulations: A Fantasy of the Real," invited viewers to engage in collective imagining. Curated by Joyce Toh, the exhibition staged a conversation among Southeast Asian positions on reality, shared histories, parallel politics, and entanglements with misinformation.

Indonesian art was prominently foregrounded, probing both the tangible and intangible. Yunizar visualized rasa—a multifaceted term in Bahasa Indonesian for taste, feeling, and aesthetic intuition—in his vibrant painting Kepiting Kuning (Yellow Crab) (2025). His introspective sensibility contrasted with Hahan’s socially charged The Irony of Protester (2021), which fuses paramilitary imagery with pop-cultural motifs.

The inquiry widened as Kawayan de Guia, Mark Justiniani, and Kiri Dalena approached lived experience, history, and framed perception as distinct but overlapping forms of truth. Observing silence, November (2025) revealed a more inward de Guia, drawing onlookers into a liminal threshold where the visible meets the felt. Justiniani’s Fluxer (2025) used a praxinoscope to destabilize the apparent immediacy of reality through shifting mirrored figures. Dalena’s After Frau Manila 9125 and After Manila Woman 9116 (both 2025) layer clothing onto archival photographs of Filipina women—once reduced to specimens by Dean Conant Worcester’s 20th-century anthropological project—to restore dignity and agency of the sitters and, by extension, to a nation historically stripped of both. Together, these works suggest reality as layered, empirical, and illusive.