Stephanie Syjuco: Inherent Vice
Conversation and Book Signing with Stephanie Syjuco and Isa Nazareno, moderated by Jerome Gomez
August 31, 2024 at 2:30 PM (PHT) | Copies of The Unruly Archive will be available for purchase | RSVP here
About the Exhibition
Over the past 5 years, Stephanie Syjuco has explored American museums and institutional archives for representations of the Philippines during the American occupation. Cognizant of the way that the seemingly neutral documentary photograph was a powerful tool in the colonial enterprise, her work attempted to deny the colonizers control of the narrative, disrupting the image to foreground the lost agency of the subjects.
In Inherent Vice, Syjuco engages with a period from a more recent past, featuring images from the late 1960s to 1972 in the photo-morgue of the now defunct Manila Chronicle newspaper housed in the Lopez Museum and Library archives. A contrast to the American colonial records, this is a repository of materials by Filipinos for Filipinos, the visual representation of a young nation trying to define itself as captured by photojournalists. Syjuco attempts to make sense of disparate images that she encountered - young people partying and posing confidently in fashionable clothing, riot policemen poised for action, farm workers, agricultural products, student activists and politicians, interior design and decorative plants. She rephotographs them piled on top of each other alluding to their complex co-existence and interaction; leaving in editorial marks, handwritten labels and portions of envelopes that point to the physicality of the material.
Challenging neat presentations of oft repeated themes that have become seared into our collective memory to form a linear narrative, Syjuco’s collages and layered visual composites acknowledge the fragmented way in which we remember history.
– Yael Buencamino Borromeo
Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive
Artwork and Text by Stephanie Syjuco
Texts by Astria Suparak, Carmen Winant, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jason Lazarus,
LJ Roberts, Minne Atairu, Pio Abad, Savannah Wood, and Wendy Red Star
$65
Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive is the artist’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is "a type of forensics...what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive." By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images. As she states in the book's introduction, "I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things."