Miko Revereza
Nothing to Declare

From November 19, 2026, to January 23, 2027
Opening on November 19 at 5 pm

From somewhere off-screen, Miko Revereza speaks in stops and starts, making syncopated observations on a sequence of photographs. Blurred and overexposed, these images are mainly of airports: liminal spaces and duty-free. The eye squints as travellers streak from one edge of the frame to the other.

But where is the maker of this film, titled Nothing to Declare? Imagining the film’s frame as a legal border he cannot enter, he moves around the image’s contours, on the other side of visibility. He stows himself between images, smuggling himself across as though the film were luggage. Imagination becomes a form of refusal, and he runs with it. The frame is also a balikbayan, a word in Tagalog that names both a box of goods sent to the Philippines and a person who returns there. The filmmaker is a balikbayan. This accumulation of metaphors is employed as an interarticulation, and as a decoy: a means to circumvent the system.

In effect, the film is a stop-motion animation. It is built from photographs taken in burst mode, in which a single click produces several images in pursuit of a subject. Each frame’s stillness strains against the magic of being set in motion. “Stop” also takes on significance when considering Revereza’s experience of being legally undocumented and the prohibitory infrastructures that limit his movement.

Nothing to Declare is presented alongside works that chart a gradual shift in Revereza’s interest, from documenting the real to catalyzing psychic interiority and metaphysicality. Distancing, a 16 mm film, documents his decision to leave the USA, where he was raised, and go “home” to the Philippines. Transmolecularizaciónes, from an ongoing series, focuses on video abstractions or ciphers composed using masks, opacities and feedback that then circulate forms in fields of colour. Also on view is Loophole Prototypes, an installation of circuitous wire sculptures, conceived as apparatuses of transmission and as material meditations on what the artist speculatively calls loophole cinema.

Miko Revereza is an experimental filmmaker and writer living in Oaxaca. Revereza has directed a series of essay films informed by experiences with migration and exile: DROGA!, Disintegration 93 – 96, No Data Plan, Distancing, El Lado Quieto and Nowhere Near. These works have been screened at festivals and institutions, such as Locarno Film Festival, TIFF (Toronto), NYFF (New York), and MoMA (New York). In 2026, he published the book Nowhere Near with Wendy’s Subway. Revereza has an MFA from Bard College, his films are distributed by LUX and is the co-founder of Cinema Antena in San Agustín Etla. He is the recipient of a Vilcek Prize in Filmmaking, Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and is listed as Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Film.