In Earthen Certainties, Ella Mendoza, Roan Alvarez, Roselle Perez, and I examine what we think we know in times of instability. Working with clay, circuits, and collaged prints, we reconsider the ways we hold on to what we know, what we are sure of, even as our conditions in this world constantly shift and change. By sensing the world through the installation and staying with what the hands can hold, Earthen Certainties offers a shared, temporal space for being. This exhibition invites you into the sensing of the artists’ perspectives: what do you see, hear, and feel through their works?
Opening this 13 May, we come together through grounded, embodied practices once considered marginal, associated with craft or hobby. Here, there is a conscious engagement with the material world, drawing on Tsing’s idea of paying attention to the earth not as an abstraction or without ideological beliefs, but as a complex place conditioned by both problems and possibilities.
Earthen Certainties, with artworks by Ella Mendoza, Roan Alvarez, and Roselle Perez, will run until 3 June at Underground Gallery, Makati, Philippines.
Pete Jimenez in front of his artwork A Show of Hands a 10’ x 10’ piece made of almost 4,500 used linemen’s leather gloves, each marked by labor and time.
Presented by Underground at ALT 2026, the work is now installed in a museum in Batangas. Captured right after installation, mounted by the artist with the Underground crew.#tatakunderground #petejimenez #artph #alt
Final day to view Underground’s featured artworks at ALT Art 2026. Happening today, February 15, at the SMX Convention Center–MOA. #tatakunderground #altphilippines #ALTart2026 #artph
Underground | Special Project
Lesley-Anne Cao
Amphibian palm
2026
Amphibian palm is an installation with aquarium tanks containing
“books.” The work explores ideas around books and the activity of reading.
What constitutes a book? Does binding together sheets of any material create a book? What constitutes reading? With the aid of electronic wavemakers automated by timers, each of the book’s pages flip from one end to the other: they undulate or behave like books, at other times rest or stutter. Music composed for them plays with them. The automated flipping displaces human agency and asks if, in this environment, reading continues to happen, and if so, who or what is doing the reading.
Cao is interested in materials and arrangements that can continue to change while they are being presented and viewed - in works that in some ways can have their own lives, logic, or improvisations, and where the work can shift moment to moment and person to person. In this new iteration, the space is constructed as part of the work. The contents of its three tanks include textiles, film photographs, flora, plastic wrappers, embroidery, retired names of our most destructive typhoons, air, dust, reflections.
#artph #altart2026 #tatakunderground
Rhaz Oriente
Memory as an Archipelago, Time as the Eraser
2026
Data-based textile installation, single-channel video, and floor sculpture
Rhaz Oriente’s ontological treatment of Memory as an Archipelago, Time as the Eraser reveals her process in which an idea materializes from inception, to production, then presentation.
For this exhibition, she focuses her lens on the multifaceted nature of time. Fragments of memories from eras gone by, what could have been, an imagined timeline, the naked truth, and visions of a future that is bound to happen are woven on pictographic tapestries as vast as the sea; that she both visualizes in a new light and contains in honor of what was once unreclaimed by human machinations.
In the space that Oriente’s work will occupy, one will be welcome to experience and converse about how dense time really is and navigate it properly. Memory will serve as a map, moving images will be a guide to remembering (or forgetting), and portals to switch to an alternate reality will be available.
Jerome Destacamento
#altart2026 #artph #tatakunderground
ALT ART is on the horizon.
Presenting Underground's featured artists for the upcoming event.
ALT ART is presented by the ALT Collective, in partnership with BDO Private Bank, and Co presented by Nagaraya
Supported by
The Friends of Alt, Boysen, The Moment Group, Terry's Bistro,
ARC Gin, Samsung, Savea Bay City Manila, Lifestyle Asia and Bluprint
13-15 February at Hall 1&2 SMX Mall of Asia
Vernissage and Media Preview 12 Feb
Underground presents Rhaz Oriente at
ALT DISCOVERIES.
ALT DISCOVERIES is a platform presenting fresh insight and novel perspectives through nine artists, each delivering a solo presentation that is both compelling and critically engaged.
ALT ART 2026 is presented by the ALT Collective, in partnership with BDO Private Banking, and co-presented by Nagaraya
Supported by The Friends of ALT, Boysen, Samsung, The Moment Group, Terry's Bistro, Arc Gin, Savea Bay City Manila, Lifestyle Asia, BluPrint, and Lifestyle. INQ
ALT ART 2026
February 13 - 15 | 11am to 7pm
Hall 1 & 2 SMX Manila
Secure your tickets via /event/
22773
Underground presents Lesley-Anne Cao at ALT Project Spaces.
ALT Project Spaces presents eleven engaging, bold, and provocative artistic propositions that further expand the initiative's curatorial scope and frame Philippine contemporary art within local and global discourse.
ALT ART 2026 is presented by the ALT Collective, in partnership with BDO Private Bank, and co-presented by Nagaraya, with support from Friends of ALT, Boysen, The Moment Group, Terry's Bistro, ARC Gin, Samsung, Savea Bay City Manila, Lifestyle Asia and BluPrint Magazine.
ALT ART 2026
February 13 - 15 | 11am to 7pm
Hall 1 & 2 SMX Manila
Secure your tickets via /event/
22773
