Matereality: Hilata

First Coworking Community, First United Building, Escolta, Manila
Dec 7 - 14, 2025

Artists:
Catalina Africa (Baler)
Cindy Aquino (Malabon)
Con Cabrera (Quezon City)
Veronica Lazo-Dayrit (Cainta)
Pauline Despi (Paranaque)
Titat Ledesma (Marikina)
Potti Lesaguis (Quezon City)
Masi Oliveria (Baguio)
Annie Pacaña (Quezon City)
Tanya Villanueva & Olive Madrigal (Quezon City)
Len Len (Quezon City)
Yllang Montenegro (Makati)
Jenny Suarez (Antipolo City)

Mother refuses to be filed away in that dusty archive of blame. Now, she’s the art monster—glitching through the domestic and digital realities, paint in one hand, phone in the other, multitasking across dimensions. The "monstrous feminine" was supposed to be scary; now, she’s mostly under-slept and flooded with group chats about class snacks.

The exhibition Matereality (a title braiding mater, reality, and materiality) gathers artist-mothers who refuse to be just one thing. First shown at Artinformal in Greenhills in April 2022 during the pandemic, the project’s second iteration at the UP Fine Arts Gallery in 2024 explored themes of work, life, and art balance that artist-mothers navigate every day. For this third iteration, Matereality connects with the ESC Biennale’s theme Tambay (loitering or hanging out) through the idea of hilata.

The artist-mother must invent a new self because the existing categories are insufficient. She is not the mythic monster, nor the saint, nor the self-sacrificing domestic, nor the carefree bohemian. She is a hybrid creature of art and labor, of disruption and maintenance, of ambition and surrender.

Matereality asks what happens when you stop trying to keep things separate—the art and the life, the studio and the sink. As materials inform works of art, they embody the work of the mind: memories, thoughts, and vision. The works in this exhibition are what happens when the mind wanders while folding towels, when thought leaks through materials, becoming love letters and complaints, devotional and deranged, written in the small economies of time: baths, repairs, meals, and lullabies. Made with the materials at hand: thread, fatigue, guilt, joy, receipts, camera, milk stains, and ink. The work refuses to transcend the domestic; it sprawls.

This is the face of the mother she meets alone, when all the work of maintaining life finally leaks through the mask. She has a thousand faces: some divine, some utilitarian, some feral, some stitched together from scraps of sleep and hope. In this exhibition, the domestic is elevated into the mythic, and the mythic dragged lovingly back to earth.

Here, the mother is no longer saint or monster or martyr. She is the artist. And the material is her life. To be a mother in the world today—to make art, to make life, to make time—is to be all the myths at once: the sacred and the monstrous. The nurturer and the rebel. The one who lies down—and dreams creation into being.

Text by Masi Oliveria