2025 was challenging for Filipinos, to say the least. It was always foregrounded with stressful discussions of corruption, economic unrest, threats of war, and general misinformation that was inescapable. Which is why art has become such an important outlet of activism for people over the past year: what better speaks to this moment in our country than art that goes beyond beauty and instead looks at the ugliness of our world, demanding better, demanding change for our lives?
For our year-end roundup of the art scene, BluPrint highlights six exhibitions that go above and beyond in discussing the pertinent issues of our age. These exhibitions use art as a platform to push against social injustice and rally people towards a common cause.
Combining the works of Philippine photographer Lee Morale and American artist Kia LaBeija, this exhibition at Kalawakan Spacetime epitomizes the queer experience in both countries. LaBeija, a queer artist who was born HIV-positive, uses her artwork to depict her experiences as a woman of color dealing with HIV; Morale, a transgender woman from Mindanao, finds glamor in the mundanity of everyday Filipino life through her photographs.
Both women fight against their marginalization by crafting their own narratives on who they are. In a year where LGBTQ+ rights have been embattled across the board in Western countries, the ability to be able to tell one’s story in their own words and images becomes more necessary to combat lies and misinformation proliferating online against their own community.
Read more: ‘Gloss with a Purpose’ and Exploring Truths in Performing Queerness
Not many art exhibitions this year spoke of the tragedy of the Gaza bombings and genocide as explicitly as last year, partially because of increasing economic unrest around the world, and partially because Western institutions like the British government has openly attacked activism against Israel’s treatment of Palestine as ‘terrorism.’
Thus, an exhibition like To Gather, Together remains a shocking reminder of the atrocities being done abroad—and their links to the atrocities being done in our country.
One of the exhibitions shown at Gravity Art Space in July, it was a group exhibition organized by Buen Abrigo that centered around the concept of community: finding the similarities and common ground between groups without removing the differences in each culture and person.
The exhibition laid stark the necessity of community, of having groups of people with shared values together, in launching resistance against the unjust practices and laws of imperialist powers here and abroad.
Its explicit protest against the killings of Palestinian children and families is just one of the many points of injustice it references, among those the Duterte’s drug war that killed many innocent lives and labor rights across the country.
“It brings together artists whose works explore knowledge-making, survival, and resistance through forms rooted in local realities—whether in urban loops or rural rhythms,” the exhibit write-up said. “These are not grand gestures, but lived articulations of being with others: works shaped by collaboration, kinship, ecology, and struggle.”
Artist Lyra Garcellano pushes forward a broader, but no less important, piece of societal commentary and activism with her in-progress board game Stakeholding. The game is rooted in society’s inequality, with players receiving different amounts of ‘capital’ based on identities they randomly draw from a bag. There, they try to navigate achieving their goals despite, or because of, the status they are born into.
It is a game that also functions as commentary on how art can’t fully depict society in all its complexity. Our roles can be interconnected, yet a single artwork can’t bring them together. Which is what Stakeholding provides: a more comprehensive and complicated look at the multiple factors that make life easier or harder for every individual out there.
Read more: ‘Stakeholding’: Looking at the Praxis of Political Ideology in Gaming
Jose Olarte’s exhibition at Gravity Art Space puts viewers in a hyper-small space of screens, fluorescent lights, and cubicles, pushing for a discussion about consumerism, and how devalued work and reality are, to the point that they become separate from how we see society as a whole.
Karl Marx has this theory where he discusses how workers lose meaning to their life and happiness when they become cogs of the machine, separated from their labor. Olarte’s exhibit puts viewers inside a tiny room where the only way to see through society is a screen.
It seems to mock our simulated world, engrossed in computers and smartphones, prompting us to wonder how separated we are from society, never truly seeing how our work benefits the world, and never getting rewarded for it. The exhibit touches upon our society of inequality as the rich hoard more and more resources for the benefit of no one, asking pertinent questions about what we end up getting from it in the long run.
“In an era where hard work doesn’t necessarily produce rewards, and where work anxiety is all but normalized, what does it really mean to be working class in the 21st century?” the exhibit write-up asked.
Paul Eric Roca, an illustrator best known for his satirical newspaper illustrations, created this exhibit at Altro Mondo Creative Space in February as a reflection on our society’s corruption. The imagery is loaded, actively highlighting the decay of society’s fixtures while pushing viewers to action.
“His fantastical and surrealist works serve as haunting allegories,” the exhibit write-up said. “[They are] grotesquely twisted visions that transform the familiar into the bizarre and the strange.”
Read more: ‘Creatures of Apathy’ Explores the Grotesque Sides of Humanity
As a final, positive, and hopeful note on activism, here is a program aimed at teenagers and young adults that shapes artists’ futures today. The Angat Sining Fellowship, run by the non-profit organization Angat Buhay, seeks to support young, up-and-coming artists in nurturing their talent and providing opportunities for artistic expression.
More than a platform to show their art, as the young artists were exhibited in UP Parola Gallery in February, the Fellowship allowed for them to be mentored by established legends like Benedicto Cabrera, or more widely known as BenCab, and Mark Justiniani, and organizations like Ang llustrador ng Kabataan (Ang INK).
The initiative pushes for a future where art has an active place in people’s homes, one where everyone can become an artist, not just for the chosen few. It is hopefully a future that one can look forward to, even with all the tumultuousness of our world.
Read more: ‘Angat Sining’ Highlights the Importance of Art Advocacy in the Philippines
These six examples of activism show how art gives a voice to the marginalized, the angry, and the downtrodden, through images and actions that imprint themselves on our minds. In the end, artists get to choose how they use the voices and platforms given to them.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: Political Art in 2024: How Artists Discuss Our Sociopolitical Climate
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