Nothing quite puts an artist on the spot like getting cornered at a cocktail party and being asked to describe their work. And yet, as many artists soon learn, the elevator pitch is often a necessary evil — a problem with no great solutions. The artist Stephanie Comilang has developed a shorthand: invoking two familiar genres that combine to hint at a third. She calls her video-based artworks “science-fiction documentaries.”
For the most part, the logic behind is apparent throughout her new show at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, a nonprofit arts organization in Lower Manhattan. Titled “An Apparition, A Song,” this show — her first solo exhibition in the United States — unfolds across three darkened rooms, each containing a video installation zhuzhed up with textiles, floor cushions and other accouterments.
Documentary filmmaking’s influence on Comilang, 44, a Filipino-Canadian artist and filmmaker based in Berlin, is unmissable. The show features a panoply of interviews with subjects like a Filipino shaman and an amateur K-pop performer in Dubai. While science-fiction’s influences may be more subtle, they’re still there. Rather than creating futuristic landscapes populated by unfamiliar devices, the show instead imagines stories around present-day technology, using voice-overs to give inner monologues to a flying drone, in one video, and a virtual assistant much like Siri or Alexa in another.
Still, Comilang’s free-associative, poetic approach extends far beyond what most of us will imagine when we hear the term “sci-fi documentary.” Her videos also draw from the visual language of social media, not to mention the work of filmmakers like Chris Marker and Agnès Varda, celebrated figures in the French New Wave.
The show is theatrical too, relishing its use of props. One video installation, “Search For Life II” (2025), includes footage projected onto a beaded curtain made of synthetic pearls, whose significance quickly becomes clear when the video explores histories of pearl-diving around the world. Elsewhere, a humbler material comes into play: Cardboard boxes, broken down, line the floor beneath the three screens making up “Come to Me, Paradise” (2018). The dry, comforting smell — clean and pulpy — of these flattened boxes starts to feel crucial to the work, which also includes footage of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong on a rare day off. Congregating in outdoor plazas and underpasses, the women use the salvaged cardboard boxes as makeshift structures. They dance, meditate, and dare themselves to imagine giving up their jobs and returning home.
Comilang is the 2019 winner of the Sobey Prize, Canada’s most prestigious contemporary art award. And earlier this year, when “Search for Life II” was shown at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, it garnered significant attention. Until now, though, her work has largely escaped the notice in America that it deserves. Why is that? I’ve wondered whether it’s partly because progressive institutions, in their recent, well-intended efforts to be more inclusive, have turned their focus to art that primarily relies on its creators’ personal and familial histories — the artist’s equivalent of “writing what you know.” Could such tendencies have back-burnered work like Comilang’s, which directs much of its curiosity to people outside her own communities?
Still, Comilang’s interests in mass migration and cultural exchange seem shaped by her own background. She told me in an interview that her father, who immigrated from Manila to Toronto in 1975, enthusiastically moonlights as an Elvis impersonator — perhaps an odd, small-scale consequence of America’s imperialist legacy in the Pacific. Comilang remembers helping him add jewels to his costumes, but also cowering behind a couch in embarrassment while he belted out “Hound Dog” and other classics in front of her friends. For her first video out of art school, Comilang sought out other children of Elvis impersonators across Asia, making a straight documentary that interwove their recollections with her own.
Comilang’s early interests in such strange connections and cultural brews, left in the wake of migration and global trade, show no signs of waning in her recent output on view here. In her work, there are overlaps with the nonfiction genre of commodity histories (“dad books,” as one friend calls them), like Mark Kurlansky’s “Cod” and John McPhee’s “Oranges.” But unlike these trade-book microhistories, what Comilang creates is decidedly art and not journalism: It scratches at the poetry beneath the surface of things, instead of always needing to prove its point.
Some might find her subjects woven together too loosely for their taste. For me, a unity underlies it all, snowballing into view the longer one lingers with the art. Whether Comilang’s focus is artificial intelligence, Korean pop music, or the pineapple’s long history as a luxury item (as documented in a 2022 work titled “Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?” that Comilang created with the artist Simon Speiser), her art reveals the sinewy strength of everything knitting people together across great distances. That can be global trade. Or it can be hand-operated drones and livestreams: the technology we use “to sell, to connect to our loved ones, to connect to others,” as the artist explained to me in an interview.
“An Apparition, A Song” would have probably felt contemporary wherever it was shown. By happenstance, it seems extra tailored to this particular American moment. Against a backdrop of increasing barriers and tightened border security in the United States, Comilang’s artwork reads as both elegy and repartee. Though the subjects she interviews represent a variety of ages, her videos seem consonant with the perspectives of a younger generation raised on an internet that transcends borders. There’s a tacit understanding, from that vantage point, that global interconnectedness is all but impossible to reverse. Once removed from its packaging and tried on for size, it can’t be stuffed back into the drop-shipped bubble mailer from which it came.
Stephanie Comilang: An Apparition, A Song
Through Aug. 10, the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, 225 West 13th Street, Lower Manhattan; cara-nyc.org.
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