Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Stephanie Syjuco

The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, established in 1994 by Madeleine Plonsker, Harvey Plonsker ’61 and their son, Ted Plonsker ’86, examines current issues in contemporary art.

Stephanie Syjuco will present this year’s Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art beginning at 6 p.m. at the Williams Inn Ballroom.

The lecture will be preceded by a reception from 5 to 6 p.m. 

The program will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. 

Learn more and register here.

Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive

I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.

— Stephanie Syjuco

The Unruly Archive is Syjuco’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.

Learn more here.