MANILA.- Opening today, Saturday, 30 May 2026, Silverlens Manila presents The Coconut Tree Methodology, a new exhibition of works by Martha Atienza. The show will remain on view through 11 July 2026.

For Martha Atienza, that world is anchored to the Bantayan Islands in Cebu, where the Dutch-Filipino artist was in part raised, bearing witness to coastlines being transformed by rising sea levels: a fact that Atienza has diligently documented as a central facet of her award-winning transdisciplinary practice.

Highlighting that shift is footage the artist filmed in 2026 of a seawall built along the same stretch of coastline she shot in 2019, when fallen coconut trees peppered an open shore, their roots shaken loose by rising sea levels and consequent coastal erosion. As Atienza notes, those coconut trees were the first to register the transformations being wrought by climate change. First they fell. Then, they were cast adrift, carrying traces of past attachments while bearing the weight of uncertain futures into the sea. Some of these spectral sentinels found their way back to land with a warning, their forms transformed into embodied testimonies of their displacement: a politics without words.

In this shifting landscape, everything becomes a witness, from the concrete encasing waterlines like tombs to the fisherfolk struggling to retain their connection to the sea. Even those who enter the gallery, far from Bantayan, are drawn into a reality that the coconut trees amplify in their monumental silence.

Words by Stephanie Bailey

The Coconut Tree Methodology is on view from 30 May to 11 July 2026.

COLLECTORS PLUS

Also opening today at the Silverlens Den, Collectors Plus showcases a focused selection of Southeast Asian contemporary works spanning the past three decades. The exhibition runs through 11 July 2026.

Material experimentation and formal inquiry emerge early through Raffy Napay’s tactile thread-on-canvas work, Syagini Ratna Wulan’s atmospheric canvas, and Syaiful Garibaldi’s microscopic spore-based art. Key career milestones are highlighted by Geraldine Javier’s seminal mixture of oil painting, intricate embroidery, and biological specimens, which explores preservation and the macabre.

Moving toward contemporary timelines, Dina Gadia uses a collage-based logic to subvert mid-century graphic tropes, while Pow Martinez presents a decade of evolution translating the grotesque and mundane into monumental painting. Yasmin Sison captures domestic vulnerability and quiet narratives of childhood, which stand in dialogue with Gilda Cordero Fernando’s whimsical yet poignant aquarelle perspective on Filipino life.

The presentation is further contextualized by the meticulous graphite works of Patricia Perez Eustaquio and the rigorous formal inquiries of Maria Taniguchi. Finally, Mit Jai Inn’s spare, unstable compositions anchor the show alongside evocative paintings by Soler Santos and Gene Paul Martin, allowing these diverse practices to intersect, interrupt, and refract one another.

Collectors Plus is on view from 30 May to 11 July 2026 at the Silverlens Den.