Oct 27

Oct 27 Stephanie Comilang: Weaving Pearls, Migration, and Memory into Speculative Futures

Art, Creative People, Culture, Film, Photography

There's something deeply moving about discovering an artist whose work feels like it's been waiting for you. For us, that artist this year has been Stephanie Comilang, a Filipina-Canadian filmmaker whose "sci-fi documentary" films exist in that rare space between the imagined and the achingly real.

Born in Toronto in 1980 and now based in Berlin, Comilang creates work that refuses easy categorization. Her films feel too possible to be science fiction, too intimate to be documentary. Instead, they carry the quality of visual letters or confessions, driven by multiple voices that collectively map the human experience of displacement, labor, and longing in our globalized world.

We fell in love with a particular work ( ChertLüdde booth at Frieze) from her recent Search for Life series: a beaded curtain strung with blue and purple pearls, replicating a still from her 2025 film. But this isn't mere decoration, it's a portal into layered histories of colonialism, migration, and transformation.

Search for Life II (2025), which debuted at the Sharjah Biennial, is quintessential Comilang. The two-channel video weaves together footage of traditional pearl divers and open-air markets with TikTok videos of farmers and influencers selling pearls online. One film projects onto a screen made of thousands of pearls, viewable from a multi-level wooden pier. iPhone clips show the artist's own hands adorned with elaborate pearl-studded nail art, a look she wore during the biennial preview, collapsing the distance between artwork and artist, past and present. The film follows multiple narrative threads: traditional pearl fishing practices transformed through encounters with indigenous divers, and the journey of a second-generation Emirati-Filipino migrant navigating dual identities as a dancer in a K-pop group. In Comilang's hands, the pearl becomes both currency and metaphor, linking global cultures, glamour, and evolving technologies.

Comilang has a gift for revealing how ordinary objects carry extraordinary histories. Just as the pineapple—brought to the Philippines by Spanish colonizers in the late 16th century, now figures in Filipino folklore and crafts, pearls map the transformation of entire landscapes: Mindanao, the Gulf States, and contemporary China have all been reshaped by pearl farming and diving practices.

By tracing these "knotty networks between particular contexts and a 'global' world," Comilang's work reveals how the displacement of resources mirrors the displacement of people. Her focus on migrant experiences—on those rendered anonymous while living and working in "unstable elsewheres"—considers the growing disparity between the human and the global with both precision and tenderness.

If uncertainty has become our enduring condition—if we're all navigating flux across digital spheres, personal identity, and physical spaces—Comilang's work offers a way forward. By revealing linkages between colonial displacement and contemporary global capitalism, she asks us to acknowledge the entanglements of our particular conditions and what it means to inhabit this world together.

But her vision isn't merely critical. Comilang's work offers "a reclamation of the future through collective memory, celebrating kinships across species, geographies and timelines." Her work now resides in major collections including the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin, Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal. Search for Life II was commissioned by TBA21, Sharjah Art Foundation, and The Vega Foundation, with episodes curated by Chus Martínez and Amal Khalaf.

In Comilang's beaded curtain of blue and purple pearls, we see everything at once: the intimate and the global, the historical and the speculative, the weight of displacement and the lightness of adornment. It's work that reminds us that every pearl, every person, every migration, carries stories that shimmer with unexpected connections, if only we look closely enough.

Her work is currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, marking her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Her work is also presented at GHOST 2568 in Bangkok, at the Bangkok Kunsthalle.

By Daniela Selva