On September 16, while we patiently waited inside for the black rain and violent winds of typhoon Mangkhut to pass – talking, cooking, painting and unpacking instruments all day – many of Hong Kong’s buildings, roads and trees faced severe destruction. The authorities had issued Hurricane Signal 10 for this strongest of this year’s tropical cyclones. Many of us had never experienced a storm of such force. All photos by Florian Geisseler.
Week One In a nutshell Program kick-off: Daniel Späti, Zhao Chuan and Elizabeth de Roza Lecture: Elizabeth de Roza on Embodied Practices and Censorship Workshop: Elizabeth de Roza on Body and Space Lecture and Workshop: Elodie Pong on Secrets Lecture and Workshop: Melanie Grütter on Gender and Body Language Excursion: Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln Self presentations Day 1 This year’s program started with a vibrant morning full of first encounters and conversations about everyone’s expectations, aims, hopes and passions for the months to come. It allowed for some first glimpses into each other’s worlds – and for calming the nerves. The kick-off lecture was given by core faculty member Elizabeth de Roza. She is an artist-researcher/educator, performance maker, theatre director, a multi-disciplinary performance artist, creative collaborator and theatre academic based in Singapore. In her lecture she shared impressions and insights of her artistic work. She focused on the meaning and potential of embodied practices and talked about the creative dealing with rules, regulations and (self-)censorship. The lecture was followed by a workshop on body and space including a first …
During her workshop Sabine Harbeke had the participants share and describe their all-time favourite movies and tv series.
A selection of the video content produced by participants in the course of Elodie Pong’s workshop that was based on her project Secrets Collections (2001-2005). The workshop involved different sets of tasks and circled around the topic of confession, access, disclosure, intimacy, shadow aspects and, of course, secrets.
Research From the get-go we had a common understanding within the group that we all were interested in new technologies (in the broadest sense) and that we had the intention to realize a project which, at least for the first phase, had a extensive research approach. We started of with reading about random tech-related topics that we found interesting, mainly focused on Blockchain (a cryptography-based, decentralized database) and artificial intelligence (AI). We decided to write down interesting people, projects and institutions along the way and record the sources we’ve been engaged in. We started off with researching on AI, deep learning and neural networks. When realising that it got too technical we tried to find applications of said technologies and looked into what kind of questions were evoked by it. Generative design and the question of whether an AI generated output could be considered art were some of the first topics we stumbled upon. Also the idea of an AI as a president or even higher, extraterrestrial powers brought interesting discussions of rationality versus emotions …
Dull Boy Jack follows a multimedia approach uniting the different disciplines animation, livemusic, video and dance in one performance. Through a personal approach driven by emotions, the work reflects the complexity of the individual in the system of society. It deals with the impossibility of total inclusion in the face of the need for structure and the necessity to coexist.Symptoms of adaptation and oppression, interconnectivity and the fluidity of personal, physical and mental space are represented in the group’s quest to understand how the micro relates to the macro. Dull Boy Jack shows an individual adapting to society to the brink of self-destruction. Escaping the norm of one system it creates a new one; a heterotopia that allows for otherness on it’s own terms. Terms that again call for exclusion of another „other“, leaving us with a never-ending cycle of heterotopias (at best). SUMMARY A system always leads to exclusion.Goal for the ending: You the audience are part of a system that just excluded this individual, even if you didn’t realize it (until now). Keywords: …
KOWLOON PARK – YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT 九龙公园 – 人如其食 Title of our work and themes Our work originates from our experience of the Kowloon Park, Hong Kong, and it is broken down into two stages. The first stage explores the theme of the struggles from within, between humans and with nature, through our experimental work “Mirror of Nothingness”. The second stage concludes with our final work “Kowloon Park: You are What You Eat”, which observes the park as a micro-world of our shared co-existence in the ecological and socio-cultural environment and presents the interaction between human and food as a lens through which we explores wider themes of sociality, the dialectics of freedom and control, birth and decay. The Map of Kowloon Park The Entrance of Kowloon Park Process At the initial stage, we agreed on the theme of struggle and on the use of video as the primary medium. We experimented on movement and dance for the video and the live performance. Our performance work is unified by the temporal …
Text written by Samuel Toro Perez, Tian Jun Wong, Fang Yun Yang 1. The question In the very beginning of our working process we tried to formulate a basic question. While the common desire for a performative format and the emphasis on body movement became obvious quite soon, the matter of content seemed to be rather a challenge. After some days of discussions, brainstorming and parties, we found a topic which would guide us through our creative process without narrowing us down too much – inspired by observations and details of daily life in Hong Kong from our different perspectives: How environment, people and objects influence and form each other. Also some pragmatic considerations were important for planning our project, such as the fact that we were going to have two performances, each of them concluding a time frame of three weeks for exploring, tryouts and rehearsing, as well as a break of one week between these two phases. A second important fact consisted of the performance locations, the XXX gallery in Tai Kok Tsui …
In the beginning of the project our discussions mainly involved topics such as the perception of space in urban developments, and the hidden rules and structures embedded in architecture. How does the morphology of a city choreograph our daily behaviour? In which way is the knowledge how to organise space used to control how we move in urban areas from one place to another? What is the feeling of being controlled? When does it feel comfortable and when does it feel uncomfortable? How is it possible to perceive a city from an outside perspective? We talked about different forms of imposing control through architecture, such as the pleasure of playing in a playground. We soon focused on space design, especially for our first project which would take place in the Hong Kong club, XXX Gallery. The structure of a club is already very strong in its own. There are many unspoken rules, and social laws to abide by. Therefore, the place we hold the exhibition in gives us a structure and helped us to invent …
This site-specific sound installation explores how power and regulations operate in and through particular places, bodies, and social contexts. By looking at different situations and spaces the artists employ a variety of tactics, including soft, interpersonal tactics that rely on social pressure, and hard tactics that employ coercion and force.
In a bustling crowded city such as Hong Kong, it is difficult to be alone; yet despite being surrounded by people, one can still feel lonely. There are times when we need to be alone and there are moments when we can’t help but feel lonely. The dialectic between wanting to be alone and coping with loneliness is the theme which B/W (Henry Lee, Liana Yang, Shirley Chong and Wang Jin) chose to explore.
This exhibition expresses the different perspectives on loneliness, a feeling, which could be accepted or rejected, that one could feel forced into or could choose. While it is often evoked in solitude, it can also arise even when someone is amongst others: a city like Hong Kong, in all its density and bustle can amplify this feeling.
Reference: http://www.jodsc.com/pages/1502434/page_201712171453
On the process We started our project to integrate ourselves into Hong Kong so that finding identity in this strange city, balancing between our “ego” and “self”. For the first step of the journey, we presented our results, as parasites inhabiting the “TOURIST”. Now our journey is still under way. Our work process goes through the following phases. We experience HK first and discover our interests in city. After that, we take a step back and observe ourselves as well as what we have experienced, what we have felt and how we have changed our thoughts. Finally set a topic and make it into an art work. During the second step of the journey, the biggest interests that attracted our attentions were “imported things” from Korea and Japan to HK. You can easily see Korean or Japanese products everywhere in HK, even both languages can be seen on some the advertisements. After discovering these of our interest, we started to collect related information, visited some museums, and interviewed traders. Though, when we look back at …
Kana Nishio and Boram Lee are on a journey of developing self-cognification. Hailing from Tokyo and South Korea respectively, the two artists experienced changes of self-identity in reacting to the new environment of Hong Kong.
A conversation with Zhang Riwen on Artificial Intelligence and different ways of getting to an artwork.
A conversation on art as mediation, the creative potential of failure and Hong Kong as an artistic playground
A conversation on different ways of working and how to still work together.
A conversation on the art of collaborating, subverting power structures and telling people what to do.
A conversation on collaborating as a way of articulating ideas and how to mold these ideas into an artwork.
By Stephanie, Jaime, Patrysja
For more than three centuries, Swiss commodity trade has been caught up in colonial, and later in postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. Having fuelled early modern industrialisation as well as contemporary finance, Swiss trading activities have influenced vivid cultural, affective and moral economies. They have contributed to Swiss wealth, but also to national narratives of independence, safety and white and aesthetic supremacy. The Swiss mythology of neutrality transforms the often violent and “dirty” material complexities of mining and trading into an opaque and orderly form of technocracy, discretion and smartness.
The panel Somatic Archaeologies consists of three talks: Reading an Invisible Scene through the Experience of its Temperature, The Embodied Image, the Image Embodied and Digital Performance in 21st Century Taiwan: Huang Yi & KUKA, a New Form of Sino-Corporeality
I performed my first trip to the Moon on 9 June 2017. The launch site was the fifth floor of an old building in Hamburg, Germany.
The panel Sensory Evolutions and Medial Transformations consists of three different talks: Aesthetics and Evolution of Structural-Color Producing or Biophotonic Nanostructures in Birds, From Chiaroscuro to the Collapse of the Wave Function: Light as the Quintessential Trans Sensorial Phenomenon and Revisioning Chinese Antiquity
The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) begins with a question: What constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia – a region never unified by language, religion or political power?
Along a typical river in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems.They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, somehow everything works out in a way that optimises rice harvests for the farmers in dozens of villages. How is this possible? Google Earth reveals transitory patterns in the rice paddies that closely resemble phase transitions in physics, like the onset of magnetism.This unlocks a story of hidden order that charms the physics community, perplexes economists and offers everyone a startlingly new way to think about how people interact with nature.
Thinking is not the first thing in the human being […]. The human being, the animal, first senses himself obscurely, then senses himself vividly; he subsequently senses pleasure and pain within himself obscurely; after which he senses the pleasure and the pain outside himself; only then does he have cognition (Herder).
