Debuting her largest wall installation to date, artist Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland) presents Present Tense (Roll Call). Referencing the classroom routine of announcing one’s presence, the exhibition explores radical pedagogy in the politics of education. Syjuco’s practice spans from handcrafted textiles to archival excavations, interrogating how photography and archives shape racialized narratives of being and belonging.
For this exhibition, Syjuco, a UC Berkeley professor since 2013, reflected on her role as an educator while drawing from the Bancroft Library and the Ethnic Studies Library, engaging with their extensive holdings on student activism and research by marginalized communities. As part of the artist’s process, she collaborated with multiple participants, inviting educators nationwide to contribute pedagogical materials, thus reinforcing the interconnected nature of knowledge production.
Present Tense (Roll Call)cascades across the wall as a sprawling visual field of text and imagery, which uses documents referencing the first ethnic studies programs in the United States, including UC Berkeley’s program, born in the late 1960s. With this project, Syjuco urgently responds to the broad backlash against and recent legislative attacks on ethnic studies, book bans, and the defunding and removal of diversity programs. She transformed ordinary didactic materials into a layered constellation of fragmented and reassembled information. Her photographic approach reenacts archival parsing, selectively sharpening elements while letting others fade into illegibility, revealing how knowledge is precariously preserved, erased, and fiercely contested. By working through the logic and limits of archives, Syjuco invites viewers to reconsider the tension through which history—and its daily presence—is recalled, constructed, and controlled.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive -- BAMPFA
2155 Center Street
Berkeley, California 94720
U.S.
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2155 Center Street
Berkeley,
California
94720