These works turn geopolitics into something visual, tactile, and hard to ignore
Josephine Turalba’s work moves across performance, installation, and mixed media. The Manila-based interdisciplinary artist centers her practice on questions of division and convergence within a volatile geopolitical landscape. Reflecting on her work, she shares, “The imbalance of power and the abuse of authority intrigue and provoke me. The tensions in the West Philippine Sea, where nations stake relentless claims on shoals and fragile ecosystems, challenge us to perceive them as raw and vulnerable rather than possessions to be controlled and occupied.”
A scuba diver since the age of 12, Turalba draws from lived experience underwater to reframe these conflicts. Her works translate power struggles into tactile forms, using leather and spent bullet shells to create vivid, oceanic compositions. In her visual language, weapons are reimagined as symbols of resilience, transformation, strength, and survival. Her pieces also invite viewers to consider the tension between fragility and fortitude.
For over a decade, Turalba has maintained a strong presence in major international exhibitions and biennales. At the Venice Biennale (2015), she presented Scandals, featuring spent bullet casings repurposed into wearable art objects.
At the Nakanojo Biennale (2025), she unveiled Drifting Threads and Topographies, an installation composed of 10 piña silk panels produced in collaboration with weavers from Lumban and Aklan, alongside embroiderers from Taal. The project created connections between local communities shaped by water and craft traditions.
Her work has also been featured in the Cairo (2010), London (2016), Tashkent, and Çanakkale (2018) Biennales.
In 2025, Turalba made her Art Basel Hong Kong debut with 10 Chancery Lane Gallery through Beauty Will Save the World, curated by Iola Lenzi, alongside leading contemporary Southeast Asian artists.
This year, she returns to Art Basel Hong Kong with four new works: Waterworks, PolySea, Fins and Verdicts, and Strait Lines. Across the series, Turalba continues to explore themes of territory, ownership, and geopolitical power, viewed through a hydrofeminist lens.
Drawing from research on contested waters, her underwater creatures mirror human political tensions. As Turalba writes:
“These creatures act as simple mirrors to human interventions: creating borders, enforcing land ownership, policing populations, and performing the motions of justice. Lacking the sophistication and language of humans, they present play-like scenes. Shrimps construct an underwater wall, crabs and lobsters capture plankton, a nudibranch presides over a courthouse. In the irony of their crude mimicry, they pose a question of the necessity and justification of such human actions.”
Her use of leather, grommets, and brass bullet heads adds texture and visual intensity to each canvas, creating a dialogue between soft, fluid forms and hard, industrial materials. Across this body of work, conquest is not depicted as spectacle. Instead, as Turalba notes, “It subtly persists, embedded in both the material and the motion of the underwater realm.”
