MANILA.- After nearly three decades of championing Southeast Asian contemporary art across Singapore, Yogyakarta, and Jakarta, Gajah Gallery is delighted to announce the inauguration of its newest gallery space in Manila on 28 November 2025. This expansion marks a significant milestone in the Gallery’s mission to engage more deeply with dynamic art communities across the region and beyond.
To celebrate this new chapter, the Manila space will open with Confabulations: A Fantasy of the Real, a landmark group exhibition curated by Joyce Toh. Showcasing an outstanding roster of renowned artists with whom the Gallery has represented or maintained close collaborations over the years, the exhibition reflects Gajah Gallery’s enduring commitment to fostering artistic dialogue and cross-cultural exchange.
Confabulations: A Fantasy of the Real
“Confabulations” revels in the many, marvellous and multi-faceted forms of realities and realisms that abound in art and creative practice, while probing a central question: what manner of realism can truly picture ‘the real’?
Across the arc of art history, artists have sought to depict reality through varied approaches, creating rich, rivalling realisms in the process. From the surreal to the hyperreal, from the objective to the speculative, from the social to the magical, from the virtual to the spiritual, this exhibition explores how artists reinterpret, reconstruct, and reimagine the world — and worlds — around us.
To confabulate is, at its simplest, to converse. Yet in psychiatric terms, it refers to inventing experiences that never occurred, but are nonetheless felt to be true — a potent metaphor for how artists navigate the complexities of perception and truth in a post-truth world.
In Southeast Asia, artists have long wielded their practices as instruments of witness and resistance, chronicling environmental crises, social inequities, abuses of power, and the invisible forces shaping everyday experience. Realism in art, however, is not confined to literal depiction. Through surrealism, abstraction, hyperrealism or fiction, deeper truths often come to light.
As the well-known dictum goes: “Art is the lie that tells the truth.”
“Confabulations” invites audiences into a space where reality is neither singular nor stable, but a shifting terrain of perception and projection — a realm of unsettling questions, fabulous fictions, and infinite possibilities.
A New Chapter for Gajah Gallery
The launch of the Manila gallery represents an exciting evolution in Gajah Gallery’s vision to deepen artistic networks across Asia. Since its founding in 1996, the Gallery has earned a reputation for nurturing long-term relationships with artists, staging museum-quality exhibitions, and fostering critical discourse through collaborations with leading curators and institutions worldwide.
This new space builds upon the Gallery’s long-standing mission to champion artists and narratives from Southeast Asia while contributing to the Philippines’ vibrant cultural landscape. Situated in the heart of Manila — a city celebrated for its spirited creative energy — Gajah Gallery Manila will serve as a dynamic platform for artistic exchange, presenting exceptional exhibitions, nurturing critical conversations, and connecting regional artists with international audiences.
