Augustine Paredes: The Filipino artist who savours in longing

Augustine Paredes is a person from whom art bursts forth without relent. Gearing up for his fourth upcoming solo exhibition since he moved to Dubai less than a decade ago, the multidisciplinary artist has no plans of slowing down. When he’s not working as a commercial photographer specialising in fashion, portraits and lifestyle, Augustine is replenishing galleries in the city with his photography, poetry, painting and installations. He uses these mediums to explore what it means to desire through the prisms of migration, identity and belonging. Augustine’s photography primarily excavates post-colonial identity as a Filipino in diaspora, often hinging on historical narratives. 

Born in Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines, Augustine grew up nourished by inspiration in the spaces and stories around him. The artist began taking photos when he was only about 12 years old with a cheap digital camera from his uncle. In a matter of years, he went from capturing stills of only four-to-six megapixels at the time to installations that span entire walls showing in the UAE, Malaysia, Australia, Europe and beyond. “The stories that exist around me inspire me to make art, especially as a migrant from the Philippines and Europe,” Augustine explains to Dazed MENA.  

Augustine’s fondness for such stories culminated in his first-ever solo exhibition in Dubai in 2022 titled PARADISE 4EVER. The exhibit invites viewers to examine a ‘mirror of Paradise’ after sifting through the artist’s memories, manifested into art pieces. An image of a vascular organ stood in the middle of the pieces – the literal heart of the entire exhibit – alluding to the sanctity of a migrant’s heart. Out of the organ spills a wave of visual narratives, many redressing Biblical literature, childhood memories, mythical prose and poetry, along with commentaries on mental health, migration and the archetype of the ‘mother’.  

One installation featured a multi-layered body of work in a series of images strung together by a 10-part poem entitled Close(s)t Paradise, teasingly queering the narrative. Another striking series consisted of several performative self-portraits, which the artist burns in hoping to ascend to the heavens as a shapeless vapour with no desire. Riddled with rose-tinted mirrors, dense poetry and bursting with vivid colour, the exhibition represents an ache in the artist to reach paradise by any and all means. Every piece of art involved is stained with this desire, struggling with mortality only to grasp that the notion of ‘Paradise’ lives and dies with us. 

“I don’t want to take responsibility in changing the world, it’s a very heavy task,” Augustine tells Dazed. “I think what I would rather do is for people to reflect upon themselves through looking at my work and invite them to introspect with me.”

Longing lives and breathes in every piece of work Augustine creates. This stands true for his two self-published books, Conversations at the end of the universe (2020) and Long Night Stands with Lonely, Lonely Boys (2021). Named one of the best art books of 2020 by Vogue Italia, his debut book is a collection of poems and images that observes the ephemerality of human existence, a commentary on the enigmas of time and space. His second book, released only a year later, began as a photography project in 2014 documenting the artist’s lives and loves. While it began as a sort of chronicling, it resulted in a love letter to the struggle in seeking home overseas, filling voids and comprehending love and longing. 

But the most marked motif across Augustine’s work is illuminating the plight of migrants. His early photography, Cooking Adobo in the Hea(r)t of Dubai, is a photo series about the artist’s estranged relationship with the Philippines after two years in the UAE. A raw combination of condensed self-portraits, haphazard recipes scrawled on paper and fresh, packaged ingredients—glossy, marbled cuts of meat—the work speaks to preserving a sense of home and cooking for oneself in an isolating new space. 

His installation Goodnight, Sweet Dreams, which showed in Abu Dhabi in 2021, included a foldable steel bed with a photographic print on fabric – a self-portrait of him curled into a foetal position – draped over it. The piece reflected his disassociation and fragmented relationship with gender and identity; it’s an intimate display that yoked the migratory experience with inner identity. “There are a lot of untold stories from the migrant perspective, and all of them are an all-encompassing narrative—poignant, beautiful, painful, and hopeful all at once. 

Augustine’s curiosity for the art world propelled him from place to place, from the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea, to AlUla Artist Residency in Saudi Arabia, through to an International Summer School of Photography in Latvia. Having already put on several photography exhibitions in Dubai, Augustine only earned a degree in Fine Arts last year in Germany. Despite his globetrotting, the majority of Augustine’s work has been staged in the UAE. “My art practice revolves and evolves within and beyond the diverse culture of the MENA region,” Augustine shares. “It provides another layer and perspective on what it means to be ‘from here’.”

In 2020, Augustine founded Sa Tahanan Collective along with curator Anna Bernice, hoping to create a platform for Filipino art and creatives through exhibitions, art sales and collaborations in the UAE. The collective believes in art as a tool to transform the understanding of Filipino identity throughout the diaspora. It has since hosted art nights, poetry readings and film screening events from Filipino creatives in collaboration with Gulf Photo Plus and Alserkal. 

Voices like Augustine’s, which facilitate dialogue between distinct people and cultures that coexist but rarely intersect, are increasingly vital in the SWANA region. His work is fiercely tender, giving life to the bare bones of the human experience; endlessly seeking, longing without respite, for home, for love, for understanding. With artists like him, translating the migrant experience to stirring displays that one only has to look at to understand, the stark gaps between worlds begin to close.

“I hope [the SWANA region] continues to be welcoming to people who immigrated and chose to spend their life here,” Augustine imparts to Dazed. “I hope for more diversity in the art world. I hope for safe spaces for artists to be vulnerable and be who they want to be.”