Joel Geolamen’s landscape paintings often incorporate textile patterns characteristic of the Indigenous Tausug people in Mindanao. Born and raised in Davao, he studied Fine Arts at the Ford Academy of Fine Arts in Davao City, and has exhibited at the Yuchengco Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in Manila, in Mindanao and Baguio, as well as abroad in Malaysia, Switzerland and Sweden. Alongside his painting practice, he works as a cinematographer and art director.

The plurality of voices that occupy the varied landscapes of Mindanao is often evident in the artworks of its settler-root artists. For Tausug people, their textiles are intertwined with their culture and beliefs, and the geometric compositions that avoid figurative representation are indicative of their Muslim faith. In Habilin (Pis Syabit, Tausug) and Habilin (Tausug 2) 2021, distinctive Tausug textile patterns form mountainous landscapes. In making these works, Geolamen — who comes from a settler family that migrated to the Philippines after 1900 — expresses his solidarity with the region’s first inhabitants and their rights to their ancestral lands and sovereignty.

Return to Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago: Roots and Currents