Stephanie Syjuco
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects have leveraged open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship.
In 2019/2020, Syjuco was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include “Stephanie Syjuco: The Visible Invisible” at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas; “Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States” at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri; "Being: New Photography" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; "Public Knowledge," at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and "Disrupting Craft: the 2018 Renwick Invitational" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. In 2021, Catharine Clark Gallery featured a solo exhibition of work by Syjuco titled Native Resolution.
Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, The 12th Havana Bienal, The 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. Syjuco’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Saint Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, among others. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2008.
Brief Statement about the work featured in the exhibition
Institutional repositories, archives, and museums are tasked with housing cultural collections, framing historical narratives, and creating research opportunities for future generations. These archives are also rife with omission, racial bias, and a subjective eye toward what should be collected and preserved for posterity. How does one “talk back” to an archive and attempt to potentially re-narrate its documents and images?
In conjunction with my 2019 solo exhibition “Rogue States,” at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, I researched images in local archives, libraries, and historical societies, searching for photographic documentation of a faux Filipino village created for the 1904 World’s Fair. A newly-acquired colony of the United States, Filipino culture was showcased for the American public via a living “human zoo,” filled with 1200 imported “natives” performing dances and rituals. These displays served dual purposes: as entertainment and as ethnographic pedagogical tool for justifying racial hierarchy and white supremacy. After seeing image after image of this spectacle, it struck me that the photos, while historical, also serve to constantly reinscribe and reify the power dynamics of the time. Although factual (this indeed did “happen”), the constant effect of viewing these staged ethnographic images could also serve to perpetuate racist stereotypes, despite attempts to frame them as outdated or a relic of their time. These images, unfortunately, still speak for a culture.
By physically blocking the images with my hands, I attempted a direct way of intervening with an archive, and thwarting the viewer’s ability to fully consume the people and faces on display. Over a century after the original photos of the Filipino Village were taken, my own body, sitting in the archives, becomes both a temporary shield and a marker of defiance, while at the same time acknowledging that the images still remain.
Special thanks to chief curator Wassan Al-Kudhairi of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, The Luminary, The Missouri Historical Society, The St. Louis Public Library, The Mercantile Library, and the St. Louis Science Center for access to their archives and study areas.