STEPHANIE SYJUCO
SPECTRAL CITY
Stephanie Syjuco’s work combines photography, video and new digital media. An American of Filipino origin, she has exhibited in some of the most important international museums. The video “Spectral City” is made with images downloaded from Google Earth and reconstructs the route taken by San Francisco’s “cable car” in the movie “A Trip Down Market Street“ from 1906, which the Miles Brothers made by mounting a camera on the front of a cable car. A few days after the shooting, the great San Francisco earthquake wiped out most of the buildings documented by the film. In parallel, in Stephanie Syjuco’s video, the Google algorithm cancels out all human presences. Completely deserted, the city appears just as it would after a huge cataclysm. “Spectral City” is a reflection on the limits and distortions of machine vision, on public space and on the ongoing process of construction and reconstruction of cities.
Location
Istituzione Bologna Musei
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Via Don Minzoni, 14
BIOGRAPHY
Born in the Philippines in 1974, Stephanie Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Her work is focused on the creation of large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire.
She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors 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. A long-time educator, she has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, The San Francisco Art Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of California at Berkeley.
She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include “Being: New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Public Knowledge” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “This Site is Under Revolution” at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and “Disrupting Craft: the 2018 Renwick Invitational” at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
© Stephanie Syjuco. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
Location
Istituzione Bologna Musei
MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna
Via Don Minzoni, 14
One of the leading modern and contemporary art museums in Italy, MAMbo houses the largest public collection of works by Giorgio Morandi as well as a collection of artistic heritage spanning the history of Italian art from the latter half of the nineteenth centrury to the present in nine themed sections. It offers temporary exhibitions dedicated to internationally known artists and movements.
