Poets of Physics
Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila

A flashlight in Ian Carlo Jaucian’s installation Still Life (2026) is swinging—it is windy outside, and the piece, wired to a live weather feed, knows it. The work’s title insists on stillness, but the weather has other plans. The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design’s “Poets of Physics” is full of such handovers, where the artist sets the terms and leaves the outcome to contingency.

The exhibition finds its anchor in the work of the late David Medalla, the self-described poet of physics. Crossing from the ruins of postwar Manila into the machinery of Western modernism, he found in kinetics both medium and metaphor. The show opens with Cloud Canyons No. 31 (1964/2016) and closes with Cloud Canyons (2019): bubbles escape tall acrylic tubes before falling, by their own logic, into swirls and mounds of soap, water, and air. These works are autobiographical; Medalla spoke of them as containers of memory—blood bubbling from the mouth of a young Filipino guerrilla he watched dying as a child in wartime Manila; the foam on his mother’s pot of simmering coconut cream; clouds of condensation in tropical air. 

Where Medalla’s bubbles hold memory, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s machines enact duration. Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) (1987) is a 30-minute film in which inanimate objects—tires, kettles, ladders, balloons—trigger one another in succession. The choreography is slapstick on the surface yet rigorous in concept: once set in motion, the system runs itself, culminating in a small explosion as sparks fall over a pool of oil and ignite.