A group exhibition featuring six local artists subverting colonial narratives of the tropics
SFAC presents a group exhibition featuring six local artists subverting colonial narratives of the tropics, opening January 29, 2026
The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present Dream Jungle, an exhibition in dialogue with the novel by Jessica Hagedorn. This group exhibition curated by Matthew Villar Miranda, features new commissions and key loans by Alexa Burrell a.k.a. LEXAGON, adrian clutario, Al-An deSouza, Astria Suparak, and Carlos Villa, along with archival holdings from The Center for the Study of the Study of the Tasaday and the Jessica Hagedorn Papers at The Bancroft Library. Together the exhibition features artists who wield elements of performance to explore counter-ethnographies of the tropics, subverting colonial notions of the other.
“The San Francisco Arts Commission is proud to present Dream Jungle as a bold example of how different artists can foster a collective dialogue around identity, representation, and power and challenge preexisting colonial narratives,” said Ralph Remington, Director of Cultural Affairs. “We are thrilled to work with this extraordinary group of artists, The Center for the Study of the Study of the Tasaday, and the Bancroft Library, to make this thought-provoking exhibition possible.”
Taking its title from Jessica Hagedorn’s 2003 novel, the exhibition explores the tangle of truth and artifice behind imperial representation. In the novel, Hagedorn stages two performances in the Philippine jungle: the media spectacle of a fabricated “Stone Age” tribe and the filming of a Hollywood Vietnam War epic. Drawing from this framework, Dream Jungle foregrounds the tropics as a zone of psychic and historical projection—where the colonized land and body are scripted, cast, and costumed for imperial consumption.
Through installation, video, literature, and archival assemblage, the artists enact what Miranda calls “tropical counter-ethnographies": practices that seize the tropes of scripting, scoring, costuming, drag, fabrication, fore- and backgrounding, character building, scene-setting, and tableau to unsettle colonial modes of capture. Each artist stages a different facet of the (de)construction of performance.
“Dream Jungle pays homage to Jessica Hagedorn’s daring vision and celebrates artists who continue to wield performance and the imagined tropics as a lush, dallying, and biting evasion of colonial capture,” said exhibition curator Matthew Villar Miranda. “Through staged selves and reanimated mythologies, these artists grow our humid notions of our shifting world. They gesture, cast spells, and prod the ever-evolving notions of identity, history, and place. In a time where the discernment between reality and illusion, authenticity and deep fakes, technology and primitivity, is increasingly wrought, porous, and overgrown, the exhibition and its artists offer performance beyond illusory spectacle; instead, they insist on its truths as a necessary and fecund mode of freedom, insurgence, and revelrous self-discovery.”
“We are thrilled to present Dream Jungle at the SFAC Main Gallery and to bring this incisive exploration of the colonized land and by extension, body,” states Jackie Im, SFAC Acting Director of Galleries and Public Programs. “This exhibition brings up provocative conversations around exoticism, underscoring a very necessary interrogation of what lenses we view ‘the other’ and how we can begin to undo that.”