Andro Eradze, Berenice Olmedo, and Stephanie Syjuco Unveil New Work in Three Solo Exhibitions

Art Wall / Stephanie Syjuco: Present Tense (Roll Call)

August 13, 2025 through June 28, 2026

MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo: To ti ên einai

August 13 through November 23, 2025

MATRIX 288 / Andro Eradze: Shifting Stillness

September 10 through December 21, 2025

(Berkeley, CA) July 15, 2025—The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is launching a slate of exhibitions that include the US premieres of new and recent work by three internationally acclaimed contemporary artists. Andro Eradze, Berenice Olmedo, and Stephanie Syjuco will each receive solo exhibitions at BAMPFA beginning this season, featuring new work by each artist—including a site-specific mural by Syjuco that will be displayed on the museum’s Art Wall for nearly a full year. MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo: To ti ên enai and MATRIX 288 / Andro Eradze: Shifting Stillness represent the latest installments in MATRIX, a series of contemporary art exhibitions at BAMPFA that provides artists with an experimental platform to make and show new work. 

This August, BAMPFA will unveil a new commission by Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines), which marks the Oakland-based artist’s largest and most ambitious site-specific project to date. Inspired by Syjuco’s experience as a professor at UC Berkeley,Present Tense (Roll Call) is a text-based work that draws from the university’s extensive archives, which include documentation of student activism at one of the most historically radical college campuses and contributions from educators around the country. Syjuco invites viewers to reflect on the catalyzing role of pedagogy and the recent legislative attacks on ethnic studies, book bans, and the defunding and removal of diversity programs. The mural will occupy the entirety of BAMPFA’s Art Wall, a 63-by-30-foot space adjacent to the museum’s entrance that is visible from the street and has featured more than a dozen artist commissions since it was inaugurated in 2016. Syjuco will join BAMPFA Curatorial Associate Matthew Villar Miranda, who curated this Art Wall commission, for an Artist’s Talk and conversation on Saturday, August 16. 

For her first museum exhibition in the United States, Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico) has created new anthropomorphic sculptures assembled with fused prostheses and orthotics, which highlight the artist’s interest in boundaries of the body, technology, and normativity. Her commanding free-standing figures and intricate wall-based installations urge a reconsideration of relationships to otherness and standardized expectations of bodies. OImedo works with materials sourced from the medical field such as prosthetic appendages, scoliosis corsets, and collars, which she fuses together to create striking new forms. In conjunction with the opening of Olmedo’s MATRIX exhibition, the Mexico City-based artist will visit Berkeley on Saturday, August 16 for an Artist’s Talk and conversation with Chief Curator Margot Norton, who curated the exhibition, which includes newly commissioned sculptures that will be presented for the first time at BAMPFA.

On September 10, BAMPFA will open the first solo museum exhibition of work by Eradze (b. 1993, Tbilisi, Georgia) whose films, photographs, and installations draw on surrealism and magical realism to dissolve distinctions between the real and imagined. MATRIX 288 / Andro Eradze: Shifting Stillness marks the first collective presentation of a trilogy of videos by the artist: All Hands Bury the Dead (2020), Raised in the Dust (2022), and Eradze’s latest film, Flowering and Fading (2024). Presented in dialogue with each other for the first time, these three works situate viewers in otherworldly landscapes, in which unseen forces shift and intensify and perspectives are blurred between those at all angles to the lens. Eradze will travel from Tbilisi to Berkeley on Thursday, September 11 for an Artist’s Talk and conversation with BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton.  

“At BAMPFA, we are deeply committed to supporting the creation and presentation of new work by contemporary artists. This commitment is central to our mission as a public university museum—we believe artists are vital thinkers and cultural producers whose voices help us navigate the complexities of our time. By investing in new work, we not only foster artistic innovation, but also ensure that our institution remains a living, responsive space where urgent ideas and fresh perspectives can be explored, challenged, and celebrated,” said BAMPFA Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm.

About Andro Eradze

Andro Eradze lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. In his films, photographs, and installations, animals, plants, and other non-human subjects are often in tension with a looming human presence, as they navigate the vestiges of attempts to tame or conform them. In focusing on the space between the organic and the synthetic, he reveals an interconnectedness between all things. Eradze has taken part in several international solo and group exhibitions as well as screenings, including The Gatherers at MoMA PS1; The 59th Venice Biennale; The New Museum, New York; WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam IFFR; GAMeC, Bergamo; 9th Biennale Gherdëina, Val Gardena; 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, Sao Paulo; 14th Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt HKW; Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; SpazioA, Pistoia; Film Festival Oberhausen; LC-Queisser, Tbilisi.

About Berenice Olmedo

Berenice Olmedo is known for her sculptures and kinetic objects, in which she often integrates prostheses and orthoses. Her amalgamated beings challenge notions of human wholeness and draw attention to the political dimensions of disability, illness, and care. The artist explores the extent to which external aids are essential to human existence, critically examining established societal hierarchies and normative frameworks. Her works have been exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel; the ICA Boston; the Boros Collection, Berlin; the Dortmunder Kunstverein; the TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes; the Eres Foundation, Munich; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts; the Krannert Art Museum, Chicago; the Museum für moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt; the Simian, Copenhagen; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Haus Mödrath - Räume für Kunst, Kerpen and the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUCA), Mexico City; and CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux.

About Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019–20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.

About BAMPFA

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) ignites cultural change for a more inclusive and artistic world. BAMPFA has been uniquely dedicated to art and film since 1970, with international programming that is locally connected and globally relevant. It holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in its collection, with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art and historical Chinese painting, as well as the world’s largest collection of African American quilts. As part of the University of California, Berkeley, BAMPFA is committed to artistic diversity through its robust slate of art exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, live performances, and educational programs that shed new light on the art of the past and connect our audiences with leading filmmakers and artists of our time. BAMPFA sits on the edge of campus and downtown Berkeley, where it welcomes visitors from across and beyond the Bay Area in a repurposed building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Sponsorship

Art Wall / Stephanie Syjuco: Present Tense (Roll Call) is made possible by major funding from Frances Hellman and Warren Breslau. 

MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo: To ti ên einai and MATRIX 288 / Andro Eradze: Shifting Stillness are part of BAMPFA’s ongoing MATRIX series of contemporary art exhibitions. The MATRIX program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis.