The collaborative duo Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien are artists and writers from the United States and the Philippines. Together, their artistic practice moves from the Philippines outward to other places, addressing localized iterations of labor and capital from the perspective of imperial damage.
During their fellowship, Camacho and Lien will expand on research conducted during a three-month production period spent living in Sagay City, the site of a 2018 massacre connected to an escalating series of political violence against land activists on the island of Negros, an island in the Philippines and the home of Camacho’s mother. While this project centers on a Philippine context, it gestures towards an expansive colonial history of loss and dispossession—but also survival and resistance—that is our shared global inheritance.
Camacho and Lien’s 2018 work, Orphaned, was acquired by the Colby College Museum of Art through a gift from the Alex Katz Foundation in 2019. Made up of drawings on rice paper installed within a “mother-child bed” (a bed frame designed during China’s one-child policy) that was manufactured by a rural Chinese villager after a trip to Shanghai IKEA and sold through the Chinese e-commerce site Taobao, Orphaned epitomizes the artists’ approach to blurring boundaries between media, material histories, and global capitalist economies. They will take a similar strategy during their fellowship, sifting through a wide breadth of sources, including oral histories and archival reenactment footage, and experimenting with diverse artistic methods like eco-film processing and paper-making.
Camacho’s and Lien’s creative production and research will be in dialogue with a forthcoming exhibition at the Colby Museum, Imagining an Archipelago (working title). Scheduled to open in 2026, this exhibition will feature the contemporary work of artists with cultural heritage tied to Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico—all islands contending with the long legacies of colonialism and occupation by both Spain and the United States. In summer 2024, Camacho and Lien will attend a convening of artists and scholars who will inform the development of this exhibition.
Camacho and Lien have held solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, USA (2018); and 47 Canal, New York, USA (2018). Recent group exhibitions include the Tai Kwun Contemporary (2022), the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2021); the 5th New Museum Triennial, New York, USA (2021); the 39th EVA International, Limerick, Ireland (2021); Manifesta 13, Marseille, France (2020); the Drawing Center, New York, USA (2020); the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2019), the Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London, London, UK (2019); the NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2018); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2017), Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2017), and Green Papaya Art Projects (2009). From 2021–23, Camacho and Lien were Fellows at the Graduate School of the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany.
