ANNELISE DUQUE
Not an institutional archive, not a colonial archive, but a personal archive, an uncollected set of intimate traces. The artworks that photographer Annelise Duque contributed to the MFA exhibition could be said to comprise an archive of this sort, aimed at giving form to the emotive qualities of the Filipino-American diaspora. Even so, we might place the term “photographer” in quotation marks. When I met with Duque in her studio, she introduced herself as a photographer, only to tell me that wasn’t really accurate. Duque also told me, later in the visit, that there’s a pressure to being a descendant. Are these things connected? Her hesitance to call herself a photographer reflects the evident fact that the photographic substrate in much of her work is almost unrecognizable under her extensive sculptural interventions, the original photographs cut apart and sewn together, to the extent that it’s the cut and the stitch that predominate. But maybe her hesitance also suggests that she wouldn’t be satisfied by a stable image of intergenerational connection – that a simple photo wouldn’t do, like a family photo with everyone smiling at the camera. The photograph of hers whose subject is easiest to recognize, least distorted by blade and needle, is indeed a family photo, but taken from behind. Three people stand, tenderly arrayed, their shoulders touching, but we see only the backs of their heads. Collaged fragments of greenery swirl around the grouping. In our studio visit, Duque confirmed that the heads are hers and her parents’, and the greenery is fauna she photographed on a recent trip to the Philippines. We are far from the smiling family (not to say this one isn’t happy). Duque has given her snapshot an anonymous intimacy, setting it at the same level as photos – featured elsewhere in her work – that she took from albums in Filipino-American community archives. Duque also, through her practice of cutting apart and sewing back together, connects memory keeping with domestic labor. Against the institutional archive’s orderly forms and the colonial archive’s violent record of dislocations, then, Duque offers a personal archive of fragile relationships with homeland and identity.
— Peter Smyth, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student
EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION BY SAM LO, OSU MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2026