Auxiliary Archives
A group exhibition curated by SFAC’s Summer 2025 curatorial intern and featuring the work by Reiko Fujii, Helia Pouyanfar, and Daniel Ramos.
The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present Auxiliary Archives, a group exhibition curated by SFAC’s Summer 2025 curatorial intern, Brooke Bethune and featuring the work by Reiko Fujii, Helia Pouyanfar, and Daniel Ramos.
Adapting Ariella Azoulay’s definition of the archive as "a modality of access to the common” as a theoretical framework, this exhibition interrogates the material construction of collective memory,
Exhibiting work by Reiko Fujii, Helia Pouyanfar, and Daniel Ramos, Auxiliary Archives proposes an alternative to temporal expectations and stable histories, questioning how vernacular imagery can be rehashed to evoke a reflexive and dynamic engagement with a continuous past. Rooted in personal and familial experience, the works challenge the ambiguous hegemony of the archive as an idea, expose what is absent from dominant historical narratives, and illuminate these blank positions within both institutional and personal memory.
About the curator
Brooke Bethune is SFAC Galleries’ Summer 2025 Curatorial Intern and an Art History & Museum Studies student at the University of San Francisco. She is interested primarily in the history of photography and photographic theory, including questions of historiography, materiality, and transmediality.
Opening Public Reception Details:
Thursday, August 28, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Brief remarks begins at 5:30 p.m.
SFAC Main Gallery, War Memorial Veterans Building
401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 126, San Francisco, CA 94102
Free and open to the public. No reservations necessary.
Image credit: Helia Pouyanfar, Place is Now, 2024. Screenprint on mirror. Courtesy of the Artist.