SCAF is currently closed for installation. The gallery will reopen Friday 22 June.

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan: In-Habit: Project Another Country is the much-anticipated fourteenth commissioned project by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF).

In-Habit comprises of two intertwined stories of displacement and resilience. The first refers to the Badjao’s precarious stilt settlements that evolve and expand in response to the vagaries and vicissitudes of life on the edge. In the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) gallery space, a cacophony of mismatched removal boxes becomes an improvised shanty town, supported by steel scaffolding that stretches from floor to ceiling. The cardboard condominiums proliferate as local children and other visitors create and contribute over the course of the exhibition.

The other component of In-Habit is a three-channel video installation, the artists’ first major foray into film.[1] It explores the severely underprivileged but quick-witted Badjao children, who, trapped by circumstance in a life of limbo, have learnt to increase their takings as beggars by infusing foreign rap music with local dialect. They perform their spontaneous routines on the streets of Filipino cities, revealing uncanny humour and ingenuity. Though outwardly diverse, the two stories that comprise this edition of Another Country share overriding themes of displacement and temporality, adaption and resilience.

Extract from catalogue essay Tallstoria by Felicity Fenner. Copyright Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 2012.



[1] It is their second film. They included a video component in the stainless steel jeep, Project M201: In God We Trust, in Hou Hanru’s Zone of Urgency at the 2003 Venice Biennale.