Artists

Stephanie Comilang

Press release

Opening on the occasion of Berlin Art Week, ChertLüdde presents Search for Life, a solo show by Stephanie Comilang centered around the immersive video installation Search for Life II (2025). Commissioned by TBA21, Sharjah Art Foundation and The Vega Foundation, the film explores themes of labor, diaspora, and technology through the interwoven histories of the pearl. Writer Jayne Wilkinson reads the pearls in Comilang’s film as both material currency and objects of speculation, linking global cultures and collapsing distinctions between past and future through desire, exchange, and glamour. These histories span multiple geographies and communities, from the pearl divers of the Badjao (Sama-Bajau) Indigenous group to pearl farmers in rural China. Alongside these, a story is told of a second-generation Emirati-Filipina who bridges cultures as a member of the Dubai-based K-pop group The Pixies. Her journey reflects the cultural diversity in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) while evoking the region’s pre-oil past, when natural pearl diving was its primary source of wealth. At ChertLüdde, Search for Life II is projected in two channels against the back wall of the gallery and a four-meter-wide beaded curtain made entirely of artificial pearls. The light from the first projector spills between the individual beads to transform the whole gallery into an underwater landscape. Within this scenery, the pearl guides the audience past the installation to uncover the stories the artist has strung together with the pearl. As with the artist’s 2024 film Search for Life I, which follows the migratory patterns of the monarch butterfly to trace intergenerational stories of labor and migration, Comilang likewise uses a non-human voice to narrate the second part of her cinematic diptych. In Search for Life II, the pearl poses questions in Tagalog like, “Is the perfection of my fullness the only way I am perceived?” This spectral voice reflects Comilang’s broader approach to filmmaking, blending documentary and speculative fiction through ethereal imagery and real-life interviews. The film opens with coastal scenes shot in the Philippines, where Comilang’s parents immigrated from, alluding to the country’s rich maritime history. In the film, Comilang interviews two free divers from the Sama-Bajau nomadic community in the Philippine Archipelago known for their generations-old pearl diving traditions. They describe seeking guidance and sustenance from the ‘Sea Realm’, while relying on the pearl trade for essential resources. Yet inflation, industrial pearl farming, and commodity-driven cultures increasingly threaten their livelihoods and the continuation of this risky, yet centuries-old practice. As natural saltwater and freshwater pearls are extremely rare, formed as calcium gradually encases foreign substances that enter the oyster or mussel, most pearls found on the market today are cultured. Within these trends, Search for Life II raises questions of authenticity, complicated further through Comilang’s use of artificial pearls throughout the installation. In addition to the beads used for the projection, Comilang renders three stills from her film in blue, purple, and yellow pearlescent beads. These hanging illustrations dissolve the boundaries between film, sculpture, and storytelling while also addressing the materiality of the pearl itself. Presenting natural, cultivated, and synthetic pearls interchangeably, Comilang blurs what is real and unreal. This entanglement is demonstrated also in the video channel at the end of the gallery featuring a vivid montage of short-form social media videos showing pearls being extracted from their shells, often exaggerated or edited for heightened visual impact. Vibrantly colored, seemingly unnatural quantities of pearls are extracted from the soft flesh of oysters in videos livestreamed on platforms like TikTok. One freshwater pearl farmer interviewed by Comilang attributes the recent rise in demand for pearls, in part, to the popularity of such viral videos. The sourced videos are situated not only within the centuries-long cultural and economic value ascribed to pearls, but also within emerging technological economies where value is shaped by the circulation and consumption of digital content. While the cultural and economic impact of the pearl remains significant, it is rarely recognized for its contributions. “Will I build your cities with no recognition for it?” Spoken through the pearl, this question resonates throughout the exhibition, positioning the pearl and the migrant experience in parallel: both have had profound impacts on society, yet their contributions remain underrecognized. In her interview, the Filipina-Emirati dancer describes the challenges of growing up half-Filipina in the UAE, stating, “I don’t know why back in the days for them… if you are a Filipina you’re just nothing.” The UAE is a place built directly by migrant labor, from the physical construction of skyscrapers to domestic work like childrearing. The migrant and the pearl become, as the artist describes, “part of the same breath,” asking the same questions of labor, value, and recognition. Rather than presenting a singular history of the pearl, Search for Life II uses a polyphonic structure that broadens the migrant experience beyond the perspective of an individual testimony. And as the pearl’s voice moves through the exhibition space, it gathers resonance through its encounters with multiple experiences, histories, and perspectives. Following this, the audience watches The Pixies dancer sing karaoke to Dirty Projectors’ 2020 song ‘Search for Life.’ The film thus folds back onto itself, and into the song, becoming its very title as it searches for pearls, value, recognition, belonging, and ultimately life itself. Artist Biography Stephanie Comilang (1980, Toronto, Canada) is a Filipina-Canadian artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. She graduated with a BA from the Ontario College of Art & Design University. With a focus on the migrant experience, Comilang considers the growing disparity between the human and the global. Through a genre she terms “sci-fi documentary,” Comilang creates films whose narratives are driven by multiple voices and points of view to consider how culture and society engage with such salient aspects of the globalized world as mobility, capital and labor. Earlier iterations of Stephanie Comilang’s film Search For Life II were presented at the 16th Sharjah Biennial: to carry (2025), the 3rd GHOST 2568: Wish We Were Here in Bangkok (2025), and in her solo exhibitions An Apparition, A Song at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances in New York and Coordinates at Dawn at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Her upcoming projects this year include a solo show at the Foundation PHI in Montreal (29 October 2026 – 7 March 2027) and a group exhibition curated by Yuan Fuca at YDP (2 October – 20 December 2026), a London-based project space for Asian and Asian diasporic contemporary art. In 2027, she will also be exhibiting at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Bern Kunsthalle.