The New Gajah Gallery in Mandaluyong City, Philippines

The New Gajah Gallery in Mandaluyong City, Philippines

January 11, 2026

Gajah Gallery's new Mandaluyong space inaugurates a strategic Southeast Asian node that reframes regional contemporary art through curated realism and institutional expansion; its inaugural exhibition Confabulations: A Fantasy of the Real signals a deliberate curatorial posture that negotiates truth, memory, and market geopolitics. Opened in late November 2025 and curated by Joyce Toh, the Manila/Mandaluyong project positions Gajah as a transnational broker between Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines.


Concise guide: aims, questions, and critical lenses

- Aim: Read this as a compact critical-essay that situates Gajah Mandaluyong within regional institutional expansion, curatorial theory, and postcolonial market dynamics.  
- Key considerations: curatorial framing (realism/ confabulation); institutional geography (Singapore–Indonesia–Philippines axis); local reception vs. global circulation.  
- Clarifying questions for further research: How will Gajah balance commercial programming with local institutional partnerships? What are measurable impacts on Manila's artist networks and museum ecology?




Theoretical framing: confabulation as curatorial device

Gajah's inaugural theme, “Confabulations: A Fantasy of the Real,” mobilizes psychological and epistemological registers of truth-making to interrogate realism as a contested field. The exhibition's invocation of confabulation—memory's fabrication that feels real—functions as a methodological lens: artworks do not merely mirror social facts but fabricate plausible worlds that reveal structural violences and epistemic dissonances. This curatorial move aligns with contemporary critical realism while refusing mimetic fidelity, privileging instead speculative veracity that unsettles viewers' trust in visual evidence.


Institutional strategy and regional geopolitics

Gajah's expansion to Mandaluyong is not merely geographic; it is strategic. By adding a Philippine node to its Singapore and Indonesian sites, Gajah consolidates a Southeast Asian circuit that amplifies artists' mobility and market visibility while also centralizing curatorial authority within a private-gallery model. This triadic presence enables cross-border exhibitions, loan networks, and collector cultivation, but it also raises questions about cultural gatekeeping : who decides which narratives travel, and which local practices are subsumed under a transnational brand?

Critical tensions: market, memory, and local publics

The gallery's aesthetic—polished spaces, museum-quality installations—signals aspiration toward institutional legitimacy. Yet this very polish risks aesthetic homogenization: global gallery standards can eclipse vernacular modes of display and community-engaged practices. Moreover, the curatorial emphasis on realism-as-fabrication may be read ambivalently by local publics: does confabulation critique misinformation, or does it aestheticize precarity for global consumption? These tensions demand ethnographic attention to audience reception and artist agency.

Risks, limitations, and recommendations
- Risk: Market consolidation may marginalize grassroots spaces and alternative curators.  
- Limitation: Private galleries often lack the mandate for public accountability and long-term cultural infrastructure.  
- Recommendation: Forge formal partnerships with local museums, universities, and artist-run spaces to ensure programmatic reciprocity and capacity-building.




Conclusion

Gajah Gallery Mandaluyong inaugurates a provocative node in Southeast Asia's art ecology : its curatorial rhetoric of confabulation offers fertile theoretical ground, while its institutional expansion reconfigures regional circulation. The gallery's future value will hinge on its ability to translate transnational reach into sustained, equitable cultural exchange rather than mere market amplification.  



Premises and Method: Questions the Exhibition Poses

- Key considerations: How does confabulation function as both psychological mechanism and curatorial strategy? Which materials are enlisted to translate historical trauma into perceptual experience?  
- Clarifying questions for further research: What archival or oral histories inform individual works? How do kinetic and optical devices reframe spectator responsibility?  
- Decision points for interpretation: Prioritize material genealogy (found Fresnel lenses, repurposed plastics) or iconography (thrones, rifles, maps) when assessing ethical stakes.

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Reading the Photographic Record: Materiality as Argument

The images collectively foreground material reworking as a primary argumentative device. Works that reuse industrial plastics and Fresnel lenses (notably Suzann Victor's Poetics of Slavery , described in the exhibition texts) convert optical apparatus into mnemonic prostheses: lenses become shackles, rotation becomes ritualized attention. The photographs of suspended, faceted canopies and rotating zoetrope-like devices stage vision itself as a contested technology—one that can mesmerize, reveal, or occlude depending on its orientation. Material transformation here is not decorative but forensic: it asks viewers to trace provenance, labor, and the afterlives of colonial infrastructures.




Form and Tone: Between Spectacle and Testimony

Two formal tendencies recur in the documentation: textural maximalism (thick impasto canvases, layered pigments) and kinetic minimalism (rotating lenses, suspended grids). The former insists on the body's tactile encounter with history; the latter insists on time and motion as ethical modalities. This dialectic produces a curatorial rhythm that alternates between confrontation (thrones, rifles, world-maps) and invitation (rotating lenses that "look back" at the viewer). The photographic evidence suggests a careful lighting strategy that amplifies refractive effects, making light itself a medium of argument.

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Comparative Evaluation (Merit Criteria)

| Criterion | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---:|---|
| Conceptual Rigor | Strong; clear through recurring motifs of memory and vision | Occasional theoretical density that may alienate general
audiences Material Innovation | High; inventive reuse of Fresnel lenses, plastics, kinetic devices | Risk of aestheticizing trauma if provenance not fully
disclosed Curatorial Cohesion | Cohesive thematic arc around confabulation and realism | Some visual registers (map/rifle iconography vs. intimate sculptures) feel disjointed |
| Political Resonance | Explicit engagement with colonial labor and slavery narratives requires contextual framing to avoid misreadings



Risks, Limitations, and Ethical Stakes

The show's strength—its material provocations—also carries ethical responsibilities. Reworking objects tied to forced labor or colonial extraction demands transparent provenance and community consultation; otherwise, aesthetic reconfiguration risks becoming a simulacrum of suffering. Photographs indicate that the curatorial team foregrounds textual framing (wall texts, placards) to mitigate this, but the photographic record alone cannot confirm community engagement.

Amiel Roldan's curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational. 

Amiel Gerald Roldan   

I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts.    

please comment and tag if you like my compilations visit www.amielroldan.blogspot.com or www.amielroldan.wordpress.com 

and comments at

amiel_roldan@outlook.com

amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com 

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan: a multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.

Recent show at ILOMOCA

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Conclusion: Merit of the Show and Artists

Confabulations succeeds as an intellectually rigorous and materially inventive inaugural statement: it stages vision as both instrument and archive, and it marshals a diverse roster of artists to probe the politics of seeing. The artists—through optics, sculpture, and painterly excess—offer compelling interventions that merit continued exhibition and critical attention, provided curatorial practice sustains ethical transparency and public accessibility. Overall, the show is a promising, if occasionally hermetic, contribution to contemporary Southeast Asian curatorial practice.