Within the Box, Beyond the Frame
Joel Casimiro | Shangrila Viola
July 5, 2025
Runs until August 2, 2025
ANIMA Art Space
19 R. Nepomuceno St., BF Homes,
Holy Spirit, Quezon City, PH 1127
Within the Box, Beyond the Frame brings together the work of Joel Casimiro and Shangrila Viola, two artists examining how spatial, political, and emotional constraints shape human experience. The exhibition considers the frame not only as a physical boundary, but as a structure that governs how bodies and stories are seen, controlled, or resisted.
Casimiro’s works engage themes of displacement, state violence, and collective resistance. In pieces like Frontline of Resistance and Bantay Lupa, communities emerge through struggle—caught between fragility and resilience, silence and strength. Other works, such as Behind the Ruins and the AR-activated SEE HEAR SPEAK series, foreground the emotional cost of complicity, censorship, and survival amid systemic breakdowns. Casimiro’s visual language becomes a call to bear witness—to resist the numbness that can follow repeated exposure to injustice.
Viola’s Bounding Box series offers a counterpoint: an inward gaze into the psychology of containment. Her figures curl, collapse, and cocoon—rendered faceless but intimately human. Within these tight squares, she captures the quiet violence of depression, anxiety, and endurance. In this series, stillness becomes protest, and solitude becomes sacred. Her three-dimensional works, like Bounding Box 3D, further soften the notion of the box, offering it not only as a limit but as a vessel for transformation and healing.
Together, their works unravel how individuals are shaped by—and push against—the conditions that hold them. Whether through political barricade or emotional withdrawal, each image is a gesture toward reclaiming presence, agency, and truth.
Their works ask:
What new ways of seeing or being might emerge beyond the limits we live within?
