shown as part of

FOR THE PHOENIX TO FIND ITS FORM IN US. On Restitution, Rehabilitation and Reparation.

Ifa Galerie and Savvy Contemporary, Berlin

24 June to 29 August 2021

Thoughtful Gifts investigates objects and documents uncovered by the artist while researching at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Archives in California. Confuting the myth that the sociopolitical legacy of the Marcoses is one isolated to the Philippines, the works summon a transnational cast of characters that have either been in favour of, or vitiated by the United States’ quest for empire and the perpetuation of its political mythologies.

A seashell-encrusted eagle, a sequin clad gown and a lace fan were some of the items presented to the Reagans during the Marcoses’ controversial state visit to the White House in 1982. They were subsequently categorised as ‘thoughtful gifts’ in the Reagan archives, along with diplomatic presents from the disgraced Guatemalan president Otto Perez Molina and Lucia Hiriart, the wife of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, among others.

A series of large scale drawings retrieves the objects from the bowels of the archive, where their problematic provenance has relegated them. The drawings perform a cartographic function – intricately rendering the details of these objects with ink, and in the process, mapping political alliances that have been obscured for sake of historical convenience.

These acts of memorialisation and retrieval continue in a series of etchings in marble, based on correspondence also uncovered from the Reagan archives. A letter from Ferdinand Marcos to Ronald Reagan, signed off as ‘your faithful servant’, undermines the rhetoric of national self-realisation that the dictator weaponised during his rule. The gesture of inscribing these ephemera onto marble monumentalises the paper trail of empire, functioning as a symbolic recuperation of a repressed chapter in American history and a material repudiation of ongoing attempts at historical revisionism.