An Underwater Dream in the Memory of the Pearl: Stephanie Comilang’s “Search for Life” at ChertLüdde
Opening as part of Berlin Art Week and converting ChertLüdde’s gallery space into a dark, fluid subaquatic topography, Stephanie Comilang’s “Search for Life” enters its final hours. Enveloping the gallery in fragile waves of light filtering through beaded curtains, tomorrow—Saturday, October 31—marks the final day to experience the exhibition.
At the center of the exhibition lies Search for Life II, a two-channel video installation that delegates the role of narrator directly to the pearl itself. Constructed in the artist’s signature “sci-fi documentary” idiom, the work seeks within the pearl’s iridescent layers both a luxury commodity of the global marketplace and a silent witness to colonization and migratory routes.
Guided by the narrator pearl, the visual storytelling flows effortlessly across geographies and communities: tracing a captivating trajectory from the indigenous Badjao (Sama-Bajau) pearl divers surrendering their breath to the currents in the Philippine Archipelago, to industrial pearl farmers in China, and reaching a second-generation K-Pop dancer living in Dubai—whose economy relied entirely on pearling prior to the discovery of oil.
Beaded curtain installations swaying across the space, such as Salt and Sucre, merge with kinetic projection light to create a hypnotic play of shadows amidst sculptural forms. By bringing together labor, displacement, technology, and cultural memory through the fabulistic language of deep waters, Comilang draws visitors one last time into this mystical atmosphere.
