Bakit Pa
1 March 2025 – 28 March 2025
Edoweird, Manila
Nominated for and recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards – Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art 2025, with an accompanying group exhibition at the Ateneo Art Gallery.
About the show
For Silke Lapina, Bakit Pa is more than a song; it is a meditation on faith, doubt, and resilience. Raised between Filipino Catholicism and a secularizing German society, she navigates the tensions between devotion and skepticism, questioning what sustains belief when its foundations are shaken.
Her works explore faith’s evolving role in identity. Unknown Brother (2024) destabilizes gendered religious authority through shifting priestly portraits, while Urban Prayers (2021–ongoing) inscribes mirrors with queer theological texts, reflecting personal and sacred narratives.
At the heart of the exhibition is I could spend my life with you and it wouldn’t be enough (Manila, 2025), an installation where light, water, and text converge. A neon-lit love letter from a queer theologian glows on an acrylic cross, and on the 22nd of March, Lapina undergoes baptism within the installation’s water pool. This ritual reframes faith through a queer lens, challenging who defines devotion and spiritual surrender.
Rather than offering conclusions, Bakit Pa insists on the act of questioning. As the song’s lyrics remind us: Ito ay aking kakayanin. (I will endure this.)
Text by Liz Bautista
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Jason Quibilan
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Jason Quibilan
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Installation view: Bakit Pa, Silke Lapina. Edoweird, Manila 2025. Photo by Dix Buhay
Bakit Pa – Jessa Zaragoza,
University of the Philippines Singing Ambassadors Choir
Silke Lapina – Bakit Pa – Solo Exhibition
Edoweird Gallery Manila 2025
Bakit Pa recontextualizes a well-known Filipino love song from the 1990s as an act of remembrance, language transmission, and spiritual renewal. Performed live by the UP Singing Ambassadors, the song becomes a carrier of intergenerational memory and diasporic identity.
The work is rooted in the artist’s early childhood experience of learning Tagalog from her mother in Germany, at a time when multilingual upbringing was actively discouraged. Language functions here not only as a means of communication but as inheritance, sustaining cultural and spiritual continuity across displacement.
The performance formed part of a baptism renewal during the artist’s solo exhibition at Edoweird Gallery, Manila, in 2025. Embedded within a liturgical and performative framework, Bakit Pa unfolds as a ritual gesture that weaves together faith, voice, and belonging, transforming a popular song into a site of personal and collective devotion.
Curatorial Walk Through
Silke Lapina – Bakit Pa – Solo Exhibition
Edoweird Gallery Manila 2025
Love Songs and the Sacred: A Dialogue on Spirituality
Silke Lapina – Bakit Pa – Solo Exhibition
Edoweird Gallery Manila 2025