For nearly a decade, Stephanie Syjuco (born 1974, Manila, Philippines) has delved into museum and library collections to examine how a nation preserves and narrates its own histories. Syjuco rephotographs and reconstructs archival photographs, digitally manipulating them to reveal the instability of images and the violence of the colonial gaze. Focusing on the US occupation of the Philippines (1898–1946), the artist traces American colonization overseas as an extension of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the nineteenth-century ideology that US settlers were destined to expand their territories across North America.

Stephanie Syjuco: After/Images centers on the camera as a technology of imperialism that records and creates racialized American histories. Across the exhibition’s photographs, videos, and installations, Syjuco employs visual disruptions, annotations, and other cues of constructedness that counter the colonizer’s power to shape the visual record without being seen. In Block Out the Sun (2019), the artist uses her own hands to cover images of Filipino subjects documented without their consent by early nineteenth-century ethnographic photographers, denying the Filipinos’ continued subjugation. Other works incorporate photographic tools, like color calibration charts, to reveal authorial control in image making. A newly commissioned installation based on the artist’s research in the Seattle community incorporates photographs taken by Filipino Americans for Filipino Americans, showcasing their resilience in the wake of centuries-long colonization. Syjuco’s artistic interventions throughout After/Images explode the implied neutrality of national archives and unveil the narrative distortion embedded in the images—and the histories—they maintain.