Installation view, Animal Apocalypse, 2025, Reflective mirror perspex, size variable
The Sun is a central figure in Derek Tumala’s work and is, as well, a prevalent and symbolic force in Philippine mythology. At der TANK, 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.
Installation view, Derek Tumala Eyes Melted Gold. Natunaw na ginto ang mga mata, der TANK, Institut Kunst Gender Natur HGK Basel FHNW, 2025
Fire Ants, single channel video, 2 min loop, 2025
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. 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.
Forever Burning, single channel video, 5 min loop, 2025
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. -Chus Martinez
Special Opening. Derek Tumala Eyes Melted Gold. Natunaw na ginto ang mga mata, der TANK, Institut Kunst Gender Natur HGK Basel FHNW, 2025
Curated by Chus Martinez
Curatorial Assistance by Marion Ritzmann
Photos by Finn Curry (Installation Views) and Christian Knörr (opening)
Presented at der TANK, Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW
14-22 June 2025
Freilager-Platz/Helsinki-Strasse, Dreispitz, Basel/Münchenstein, CH
A collaboration between the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW
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