Born in Manila, in the Philippines in 1974 and now based in Oakland, California where she grew up, Stephanie Syjuco explores the complexities of concepts like citizenship, immigration and nationality. Using a wide range of media, including installation, photography, sculpture and textiles, she links history to present-day political narratives, especially in connection to image-making, the distortions of empire and the impact of colonialism. Her current exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) “Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States” takes its title from her 2018 work Rogue States, which is part of the artist’s ongoing exploration into the power and meaning of flags and banners.
The show presents different bodies of work that continue on her ongoing concerns, as CAM writes in the exhibition guide:
Syjuco is especially interested in mining archives, and exposing institutionalized histories as narratives constructed and in uenced by those in power. The artist draws attention to America’s history of cultural “othering” and rendering certain populations invisible, even as she attempts to present alternative stories of marginalized communities.
The installation Rogue States comprises 22 flags hanging in the musem’s performance space. The artist recreated flags designed for Hollywood and European films depicting real and fictionalised enemy nations through a Western perspective. With this work, Syjuco draws attention to the flag as symbol of nationhood and national identity, and their inherent complexities. The flags are representative of fictitious nations – “rogue states” – from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central and South America, which are seen in the films as backward, terrorist and unstable. The installation sees the flags arranged in rows, in a United Nations-style display of unity – and “collective anxiety”.
To the Person Sitting in Darkness is part of the same ongoing investigation into the meaning and power of flags and banners to which Rogue States belongs. Nationhood, national identity and a country’s claim over territory are all inscribed in a flag. This work – a flag installed in the museum’s courtyard – represents the latter, by reproducing Mark Twain’s original design idea as published in a 1901 essay for the North American Review, reprinted as a pamphlet by the Anti-Imperialist League. On the flag that was never made, Twain wrote:
And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one—our states do it: We can just have our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.
In her oeuvre, Syjuco displays a particular interest in researching and investigating the relationship between America and the Philippines, and the colonial attitudes and records of these links. In preparation for her solo exhibition at CAM, the artist took part in a two-week residency in St. Louis in Summer 2019, during which she researched local archives looking for information on the 1904 World’s Fair, and particularly about the Filipino Village, one of the living exhibits in the exposition.
The images she found have become part of her photographic intervention work Block out the Sun, which aims to question the power of photography and its ability to capture a moment in time that may contribute to the creation of long-lasting historical, political and social narratives. As CAM writes in the guide, “Block out the Sun attempts to deny the medium its ability to perpetuate racist narratives by literally blocking a view of the subjects of the photographs.” The Filipino inhabitants of the living exhibit are thus blocked out of the image by Syjuco’s own hands. In an attempt to block a colonial view of the Filipino identity, her intervention in the images substitutes a living Filipino identity for another, somehow perpetuating the unavoidable view of ‘the other’ that dominates in the West.
Syjuco again physically places herself in her work in Cargo Cults, in which she depicts herself in photographic portrait as a foreign and exotic ‘other’, wearing clothes and accessories purchased from American shopping malls. These garments are ordinary, mainstreet ones with tribal or “primitive” designs. Her idea for this body of work was born out of studying historical ethnographic photos from the Philippines, which were captured through a colonial lens, thus influenced by the dominant culture that created them. Syjuco’s photographs express her own search for an identity – having been born in the Philippines and raised in the Bay area – which she has “based on a collage of visuals and influences, each telling me what I am ‘supposed’ to culturally be”. Her work denies an easy interpretation of the image, by adding as a backdrop the intensely patterned “dazzle camouflage” employed by WWI British battleships to confuse enemy aim.
Two installations – Neutral Calibration (Ornament + Crime) and Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) – transform her perspectives and coded narratives of empire and colonialism so far seen in her photographic work into 3D experiences. Presented like stage sets, the installations are arranged as contemporary “still lifes” containing hundreds of images and objects, many of which are taken from stock photos and Google Image searches. Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) features two of her hand-sewn garments: an early 20th-century American gown in chroma-key green, and a Baro’t Saya – a traditional Filipino dress – made from Photoshop transparency checkerboard pattern. Both patterns serve as generic placeholders for photo or video editing, and the female garments call attention to how the female is equated to nationhood. Through this work, Syjuco addresses the notion of how controlling narratives continue to dominate despite historical and technological advances, and how past perspectives are still dominant today, making certain populations invisible.
The Photoshop transparency pattern is also used in her work Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N), which represents her latest interest in the analysis of what it means to be American. The series of works “CITIZENS”, to which this portrait belongs, is made in direct response to the current political climate in the US, divided by polarising narratives. The series comprises photographs of immigrants, people of colour, LGBTQ, young women, refugees and undocumented people, all populations at risk from the rise of xenophobia. Portrai of N makes the person behind the veil both visible and invisible, suggesting that different realities and futures are possible to construct, but only after careful examination of “the complicated and contradictory stories about how we reached this perilous present, and why”.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States” is on view from 6 September to 29 December 2019 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA.