How the Frame Decides: Audrey Lukban

Audrey Lukban’s How the Frame Decides thinks through archival material and its histories to unpack and challenge colonial narratives through the (re)presentations of power. Referencing objects, archival photographs, and specific moments in Philippine history, Lukban seeks to reveal how power and control is enacted in material and visual culture.

How the Frame Decides seemingly marks a conceptual departure from Lukban’s recent practice as a painter following her return to Manila from the Royal College of Art in London. From introspective interrogations of power in intimate spaces, working through self-portraiture and lush, ornate renderings of soft yet tense domestic settings – of which only traces of bodies are present – Lukban now turns to bodies as charged vessels of colonial history, one constantly controlled through language, taxonomy, and organization.

Through a series of oil on wood paintings and etched wooden panels, Lukban explores historical hierarchies enacted through image-making, seeking to understand how conceptions of the colonized are made and determined. In After Killing Magellan (2025), Lukban constructs a fractured painting of a figure lying prostrate. Installed on the ground, the work seeks to critique conventions of Western portraiture as typically wall-bound and fixed. In its fragmentation, Lukban personifies and visualizes the role of territorial management in colonization, explicitly thinking through the radical renaming, reshaping, and regrouping of the Philippine archipelago – geographical divisions that still persist to this day.

Lukban moreover examines the colonial act of the definition and grouping of bodies through an engagement with visual and material culture. She paints from archival records found in collections at the University of Michigan, reconstructing these photographs with a hazy and blurred quality. In doing so, she calls attention not to a fidelity of image, rather to the charged descriptions often found alongside these documents. Together with her paintings, wooden replicas of gilded frames from the National Portrait Gallery in London highlight the disparity in self-determination between the colonizer and the colonized. While the colonized body is one that has been subject to annotations and binaries, royals and nobles are free to commission their own portraiture.

How the Frame Decides interrogates how power is exercised, posing critical questions on agency and the right to recognition and (re)presentation. Through these works, Lukban invites viewers to rethink how colonial power has been enacted on bodies in history – not merely through the violent subjugation of land and its peoples, but through the seemingly inconsequential and invisible act of definition and classification.

Arianna Mercado