Exhibition
Snare for Birds: Decolonizing Perspectives from the Colonial Archives

La Union

Fri, 01.09.2023 -
Sun, 15.10.2023
12:30 PM - 17:30 Alfredo F. Tadiar Library

“Snare for Birds: Decolonizing Perspectives of the Colonial Archive” by artists Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David, and Jaclyn Reyes takes off from a shared interest in the lens of Dean Worcester, ornithologist and Secretary of Interior of the Philippine Islands during the American colonial period known for his book Philippine Island and their People. Celebrated to be a leading expert for that moment in the Philippines, Worcester’s perspective shaped US public opinion, foreign policy, and inevitably what we know to be Filipino history and identity.

Snare for Birds builds upon and challenges these deeply embedded imagery and knowledge by reciprocating Worcester’s endeavor: to engage with archival images like specimens and to claim truths a camera was “made to tell.”1 Through ongoing investigations and discussions on past and present mechanisms of power, they ask: can we be made to be experts of the colonial gaze through the production of new knowledge through image-making and re-making? If these images have historically been used as evidence of Filipinos’ incapability of self-governance, what do they reveal about Filipinos today? What does it mean to be Filipinos—generations and continents removed—engaging our predecessors today?

The exhibition, curated by Marika Constantino and Iris Ferrer, will be open to the public for free from September 1, 2023 to October 15, 2023, Wednesday to Saturday, 12:30pm-5:30pm at the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library in La Union.