Ako ay may kaibigan, kasama ko kahit saan (I have a friend; where I go, they go)
29 November 2025 - 18 January 2026
Curator:
Artist(s): Celline Mercado, Jermaine Ibarra, Justyne Allen, and Lance Zuniga
Location: Main Gallery
In this exhibition, the concept of the shadow symbolises the lingering spectres of colonial history that follow the Filipino diaspora—Australia’s fifth-largest migrant community. Artists Celline Mercado, Jermaine Ibarra, Justyne Allen, and Lance Zuniga engage with familiar symbols of domesticity and architecture—the bed, the window, the TV—to explore Filipino identity, cultural visibility, and ancestral legacy. Blending Indigenous Filipino, Western, and hybrid iconographies, their works reflect on a complex past, reclaiming these shadows as part of an evolving decolonial consciousness.
Globally, Filipinos form one of the most widespread diasporas. Within the dislocated space of migration, these artists both reinvent and reflect, acknowledging that Filipino identity remains deeply shaped by the Philippines’ violent history of Spanish and American colonisation, and the political upheavals of the Marcos regime—events that catalysed mass migration and global dispersal. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a bugtong, a Filipino riddle, with the answer being anino—shadow. These shadows of colonial history and injustice linger across time and place, ghost-like. But to hold the hand of your ghost is to face it, befriend it, play with it.
The works in this show draw from material histories and soft power, converging in forms that evoke the domestic. Celline and Justyne use furniture—beds, televisions—to question Western aesthetics and the in/visibility of Filipinos in mainstream media. Jermaine and Lance use paintings and garments to complicate the notion of a unified Filipino identity. Together, their installations construct makeshift dwellings and intimate spaces that gesture toward movement, memory, and a decolonial re/search of self.
Celline Mercado (b. 1997, Philippines) is a visual artist always caught in between, searching for a soft place to land. As a Filipino woman of Japanese descent, she is thematically interested in migration, labor and colonial histories. Grounded in materiality, repetition and rigour, her work spans soft sculpture, installation, and drawing.
Celline was born and raised in San Fernando, Pampanga. She holds a Master of Fine Art (with Distinction) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Double Major in Information Design and Art Management from the Ateneo de Manila University. She has exhibited across Asia, the United States and Australia. Her works are held in private collections in the Philippines and Australia. She divides her time between Naarm and Manila.
Jermaine Ibarra (b. 2003 Naarm/‘Melbourne’, ‘Australia’) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm/‘Melbourne’. His practice weaves between painting, sculpture, installation and music. His formative years were spent between his native Manila and ‘Australia’, a hybridity that informs and imbues itself throughout his practice. In his work speculative futures, colonial scars and episodic memory become sites for investigation, critique, humour and tragedy. He creates a constellation that, when viewed holistically, forms a portrait of his lived experience within the diaspora. This positions reappropriation, image making and authorship as tools that can be used to demand agency and self-determination within structures that marginalise and other.
Justyne Allen (b. 1996 Gulmmerogin/Darwin, Australia) is an object-based artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Allen's practice utilises second-hand objects as signs and signifiers that address themes of contemporary consumption and cultural touchstones throughout her practice. She has received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2019) and an Honours Degree in Fine Art (2023) from RMIT University and is a recipient of the ‘Bold and the Beautiful’ award. Her most recent exhibitions include 'Yard' at TCB in 2025 and curating 'Refuse (as Noun)', 2024. Allen is also a recipient of the Yarra City Arts Sustainability Grant for 2024 and the 2024 RMIT Graduate Residency. She was also a finalist in the Incinerator Gallery ‘Incinerator Art Award: Art for Social Change’ in 2024 and Fortyfivedownstairs 'Emerging Artist Award' in 2023.
Lance Zuniga (b. 2003) is a Filipino artist based in Melbourne, currently undertaking a bachelor of fine art at RMIT. Lance has solo exhibited at Brunswick Street Gallery and Green Floor Gallery in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Lance works across painting and found object sculptures to produce bodies of work that often stretch and recontextualise images. Within his creative process, he often employs digital collage compositions to synthesise and expand narratives within his work. Lance has rendered representations of Filipino folklore compounded into digital aesthetics; unveiling the multifaceted dimensions of collective identity and the alienation faced in displacement.
Friday, 28 November, 6-8pm
The opening night, with speeches and a Welcome to Country, will be held at Incinerator Gallery alongside exhibitions ...and there's no one around to hear it and Brown Pillars.