Stephanie Comilang

Stephanie Comilang (born 1980) is a Filipina-Canadian artist and filmmaker.

Background Stephanie Comilang's parents immigrated from the Philippines to Canada in the 1970s Growing up in an immigrant household shaped her idea of home and has served as the starting point for much of her artwork.

Artistic career Comilang's work is concerned with the concept of home, often dealing with ideas of diaspora and migration. Her documentary approach in constructing narratives stresses themes of social mobility, global labor, and cross-cultural communication. Through the medium of video, Comilang explores the conditions migrants face, looking at exploitation and adversity that groups endure when leaving a country for reasons beyond their control. An early influence was Perfumed Nightmare (1977) by Filipino film director Kidlat Tahimik, which sparked her interest in cinema and set a precedent for her work. Like Comilang's father, Kidlat Tahimik comes from Baguio, an old American air base on Luzon island in the Philippines; watching films created by such a relatable figure impacted how she began developing her practice.

Comilang characterizes many of her projects as "science-fiction documentaries," because she often combines a documentary approach with fictional elements and narratives. She frequently draws from the visual language of social media, as well as the work of filmmakers like Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. In the New York Times, Dawn Chan writes that "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."

Comilang's work has been widely shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe, and Asia, including at the National Gallery of Canada, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), and Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), as well as Sharjah Biennial 16 and Hawai'i Triennial. In 2025, Comilang had her first solo exhibition in the United States at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances titled "An Apparition, A Song".

Her films have been screened at Tate Modern, Rockabund Museum (Shanghai), Kunsthall Trondheim, GHOST:2561 Bangkok Video and Performance Art Triennale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Asia Art Archive in America (New York), SALTS Basel, and UCLA, among others. and ChertLüdde (Berlin).

Projects Search for Life (2024–2025) is a film/video installation diptych that examines issues related to labor, migration, colonial and post-colonial power, and diaspora through the figure of the monarch butterfly (episode one) and the pearl (episode two). It was co-commissioned by Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Sharjah Biennial, and The Vega Foundation.

Search for Life (2024) premiered at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, who is represented in the work through voiceover. Other figures share stories reflecting on the impact of Spanish colonialism on Filipino culture; it includes interviews with historian Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos; Filipino butterfly specialist Jade Aster T. Badon; a florist, Michael John Díaz, and a painter, Joar Songcuya, who are both Filipino seafarers; and a boy named Simón from Michoacán, Mexico.

Search for Life II (2025) premiered at the Sharjah Biennial, where it was curated by Amal Khalaf. It explores themes of migration, labor, diaspora, and technology through the history and industrialization of pearl diving in the Persian Gulf, the Philippines, and China. It contains a massive bead curtain on which one of the videos is projected and a large viewing platform designed to resemble an ocean pier; the installation was called “a centrepiece” of the Sharjah Biennial 16, an exhibition that featured 200 artists.

Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2022), a collaboration with artist Simon Speiser, is a video and virtual-reality installation that narrates the story of a spiritual medium and artificial intelligence named Piña, who receives, collects, and transmits ancestral knowledge for future generations. Loosely structured around the history of the pineapple, which connects Ecuador and the Philippines through colonial trade routes, the installation is a "seamless blending of imagined techno-feminist futures with the present-day labors of women shaman and activists." It features interviews with contemporary knowledge-keepers and activists, including Kankwana Canelos and Rupay Gualinga of Ciber Amazonas, a group of Indigenous activists in Puyo, Ecuador, who use radio broadcasts to form feminist alliances; Janet Dolera, a babaylan (spiritual medium) and community leader in the Philippines; and Alba Pavón, an Afro-Ecuadorian organizer of the Black Women's Movement in Pichincha, Ecuador.

Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016) is a self-proclaimed "science-fiction documentary." Following three Filipina domestic workers, Irish May Salinas, Lyra Ancheta Torbela and Romylyn Presto Sampaga, who reside in Hong Kong, this 25-minute film narrates the digital communication of these women as they relay the realities of their everyday lives and migratory work back to their homes and families. The drone camera that shot most of the video footage is named Paradise, and is voiced by Comilang's mother, Emily Comilang. Paradise functions as both a narrator and also a symbol through which the digital communication of the three protagonists is transmitted.

Exhibitions Solo exhibitions (selected)

2025: Coordinates at Dawn, SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2025: An Apparition, A Song, CARA, New York 2022: How To Make A Painting From Memory, ChertLüdde, Berlin 2017: Yesterday In The Years 1886 & 2017, Artspeak, Vancouver

Group exhibitions (selected)

2025: To Carry, Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah 2025: Aloha Nō, Hawai’i Triennale, Honolulu 2024: At the Edge of Land, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai 2024: Spirit Pictures, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 2023: Green Snake, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong 2022: Enmeshed, Tate Modern, London 2022: Blue Assembly, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia 2021: Nation, Narration, Narcosis, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2019: The Bicycle Thieves, Para Site, Hong Kong 2019: It All Makes Sense, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto

Awards In 2019, Comilang was the winner of the Sobey Art Award, Canada's largest prize for visual artists.