Derek Tumala

Derek Tumala

Island in the Sun, 2025

Installation with six light sculptures (abaca paper, metal, LED), and single-channel video (color, sound, 3 min)

Dimensions variable

Produced by TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2025

Derek Tumala’s Island in the Sun conjures a psychological landscape shaped by delirium, searing heat, and the disorientation brought on by a climate crisis that is both global in scale and deeply unequal in impact. This immersive installation—comprising video and sculptural forms crafted from handmade abaca paper—feels like it has emerged from a fever dream. Its sensory intensity evokes metaphorical heatstroke and a lived reality, especially for the Philippines, where communities face rising temperatures, fragile infrastructures, and a persistent lack of political resolve with resilience, improvisation, and survival strategies.

The work's title, referencing the band Weezer’s song Island in the Sun, gestures toward a sun-drenched haze—a seemingly carefree disorientation that, under the lens of environmental urgency, assumes a darker, more unsettling undertone. Tumala’s sculptural surfaces resemble the volatile skin of the sun, drawing connections to local mythology, particularly the figure of Apolaki, the Filipino sun god and warrior. Traditionally revered as a life-giving force, the sun here is recast as an emblem of both ancestral power and contemporary threat.

In this context, what appears as the solar surface might also be read as the Earth’s core—an unstable furnace of elemental force, teetering between creation and destruction. This duality permeates Tumala’s work, where myth and science, reverence and warning, dream and reality coexist in tension.

Island in the Sun is rich in symbolic layering and subversive associations. Music plays a key role in Tumala’s process: lyrics become portals for reinterpretation, filtered through his personal lens and artistic intuition. The result is a poetic, unsettling vision of a world at once mythic and urgently real.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW:

Group show: The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, “ORACLE”

Curator: Chus Martínez

Venue: MGLC (Grad Tivoli, Švicarija, Plečnik Auditorium), Museum of Modern Art (MG+), City Art Gallery Ljubljana, Jakopič Promenade - for detailed information, please visit the website of the biennale

Date: June 6, 2025 - October 12, 2025