Derek Tumala: Eyes Melted Gold (Natunaw na ginto ang mga mata)

Curated by Chus Martínez. Curatorial assistance Marion Ritzmann.   

We talk about postcolonialism as if it were a state of the past. But it is a condition of the present. A condition that manifests in many forms: some appear almost like ghosts, others like super powerful events, like heat or sun strokes. Heat and energy are interrelated notions. Heat began to be perceived as an entity, a force, a power so present in the social fabric with the invention of the coal-fired engines. Heat could then move machines. Humans were there to extract the mineral and nourish the monsters that would activate the million forms of industrial production. Energy is a cousin of heat. To have heat in the body means you are overpowered, sexual, dangerous. Energy is more mellow. It started being used as a concept to refer to well-being only in the 19th century with the vitalist movements that arrived from America and expanded globally; good energy and bad energy. Being hot is being desirable. Being cold is not having feelings. The energy of the Earth got slowly transmitted to the humans in forms they did not know before. Now, heat is returning to the Earth. All these factories, and all these hot humans made the planet hot, so hot that even the Sun is unable to control its power, and it strikes. The start that is the center of life, of the planet, physically impacts the Earth’s surface and all its creatures and the human bodies causing damage. 

The Sun is a central figure in the work of Derek Tumala (lives and works in Manila, Philippines) and is, as well, a prevalent and symbolic force in Philippine mythology. At der TANK—the artist's first solo exhibition in Switzerland—three works interact with each other to create a hallucinatory environment: Fire Ants (2025), Forever Burning (2025), two videos, and Animal Apocalypse (2025), a series of reflective sculptures suspended in the air. Fire ants, an invasive species not native to the Philippines, came during the 17th century through Spanish trade from South America. Today, they are found everywhere in the Philippines, in kitchens, bedrooms, gardens—an insidious colonial legacy. The choices of creatures in Animal Apocalypse are based on the scientific concept of the sixth mass extinction, which we are currently witnessing. This approach implies that apocalyptic events have occurred five times before. Some animals in this series therefore have a symbolic significance. The Axolotl, for example, endangered due to rising water temperatures, is juxtaposed with the Tardigrade, which can survive extreme conditions.

The installation at der TANK enacts a climate apocalypse, spreads a sense of the hallucinatory, enhances double vision, befriends itself with psychedelia, serves as support for present and future superstitions, and embraces delusion, delirium, and paranoia. It can be read as an extension of Island in the Sun (2025), a work by Tumala presented at the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (until 12 October 2025). All works are linked since it is a collaboration with the Biennale. In the hands of the artist der TANK becomes a strange trip to the Sun. He takes inspiration from The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), a short story by Ray Bradbury: A spaceship ventures perilously close to the Sun to retrieve a sample of its energy using a remote-controlled mechanical hand. The crew faces extreme temperatures and equipment failures, including the death of a crew member due to a suit malfunction and a critical cooling system breakdown. Despite these extreme conditions and difficulties, the mission succeeds, and the ship returns to Earth with the captured solar fire.

Indeed, we have returned with the Sun, an angry Sun that is just accelerating an animal apocalypse. The works of Tumala refer almost always to the extreme dangers of colonial capitalism, a form that is far from extinct. His work is also enacting precolonial Filipino cosmologies that imbued animals with spiritual and ancestral significance. Worldviews where animals are not subordinate to humans but participants in a cosmic balance that we—Western capital and colonial societies—have destroyed. 

But differently from the capitalistic world disaster, the apocalypse of Tumala has a literary character, one that sublimates many genres in the long history of human narration and storytelling: from mythology to science-fiction in order to come to terms with the problem of a world that is decomposing because of human actions. Colonial violence and capitalist extraction have reduced nature to a battleground. It seems impossible to convince the majority of the humans to face this fact. But art can create an experience so powerful that sooner or later it would transform the behavior of the crowds. 

I particularly like the exhibition title: Eyes Melted Gold… Gold is both as the symbol of all previously existing ancient worlds and ancient myths. Gold is the resilient greed that that still is shaping the fate of millions, causing death and destruction. 

—Chus Martínez

A collaboration between the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW
With special thanks to Atelier Mondial

Press contact
Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Anna Francke email / T +41 61 228 43 25