Born 1989, Manila, The Philippines
Lives and works in Manila

Archie Oclos is known for large-scale public murals with a socio-political message, executed with detailed line drawings and featuring portraits of individuals against a reduced palette background. Oclos also creates work intended for a gallery space, ranging from charcoal drawings on the wall, to paintings on canvas or commercial rice-sacks from the corruption-plagued National Food Authority.

In Immigrants of own nation 2021, commissioned for APT10, Oclos subverts the celebratory nature of the parade or procession to represent those who have been uprooted and dispossessed. Across a horizontal trajectory, he shows individuals from different cultural and religious groups, some in the traditional woven dress associated with indigenous peoples from Muslim Mindanao in the South or the Cordillera mountains in the North, others clutching the baby Jesus figure used in Catholic ceremonies. A broader concern of Oclos’s practice has been speaking for those who have been forced to become immigrants in their own nation.

_{Supported by the Australian Government through the Office for the Arts.}