Amid the murky ethics of archival material, Syjuco rehabilitates images of Asian and Asian American people within America’s documented histories

Filipino American artist Stephanie Syjuco (born 1974) rephotographs and reconstructs photographs from museum and library collections to reveal the instability of images and the violence of the colonial gaze. Across her photographs, videos and installations, Syjuco employs visual disruptions, annotations and other cues of constructedness: artistic actions that explode the implied innocence of the archival regime. Her most recent projects have dealt with materials relating to early 20th-century American imperialism in the Philippines, including ethnological displays from the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. This full-color catalog is the artist’s first monograph and accompanies a solo exhibition of her recent lens-based artworks. Essays by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza, exhibition curator Georgia Erger and scholar Ekalan Hou offer insight into Syjuco’s quest that we read images—and history—through multiple lenses of narrative distortion.