Para Site Hong Kong culminates ‘signals...瞬息’ series with Filipino artists Merv Espina and Kulagu Tu Buvongan
The exhibition ponders migration within the context of Hong Kong’s transformation as a city.
Written by Chesca Santiago
Words adapted from the press release and exhibition catalog
Photos courtesy of South Ho and Para Site
September 27, 2023
Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre Para Site launched ‘signals...here and there,’ the culminating chapter of the three-part exhibition series ‘signals...瞬息’ curated by Billy Tang and Celia Ho.
‘signals...here and there’ situates historical and contemporary migratory movements against the context of Hong Kong’s transformation as a city. These movements are taken to refer not only to the migration of individuals, but also to the ensuing changes that entail in the concept of home. The exhibition thus propounds a fluid conception of ‘here’ from ‘there’—one that reckons and unsettles the divide between histories and geographical distances.
Installation view of the exhibition at Para Site.
Included in the exhibition’s roster of participating artists are Filipino artist and researcher Merv Espina, along with Kulagu Tu Buvongan, a collective of indigenous and non-indigenous members advocating for environmental justice in Mindanao’s Pantaron Mountain Range.
Titles of protest music from around the world accompany Merv Espina’s work.
In a form of ‘ephemeral archiving,’ Espina’s AI-generated sound work intersects an archive of protest music from around the world with datasets based on field recordings of monsoons and typhoons. Sonic expressions of dissent are translated by machine-learning AI into new weather patterns to reflect on the existence of protest as natural staccatos in daily life, in turn signifying their potential for change and renewal. Along with the sound work evoking the spontaneous occurrence of rain, a congregation of house plants is also strewn across the gallery space. Together they are proxies of individuals who have left or are about to leave Hong Kong, acting as metaphors for a wider history of migration and displacement in the city.
Along with AI-translated sounds of dissent, plants are strewn across the space to act as metaphors for migration.
Reverberating on the roof of Para Site’s building is Kulagu Tu Buvongan’s For every name, a forest (Mgo ngaran, puwason). The multichannel sound installation plays human voices generated from recording sessions focused on forest sounds and non-lexical vocables that mimic forest sounds. From memory, these had been recreated by indigenous elders who had been displaced in refugee camps after expressing their opposition to the large-scale monocrop plantations, mining, and logging operations plundering the Pantaron Range. These sounds, some for sacred and some for play, are being taught to children, many of whom were born in the camps, having never experienced forest life in their ancestral domain. Accompanying the recordings are the names of martyred land defenders scrolling across the installation—documenting a forest of displaced human voices culled from a place they can no longer return to.
Names of martyred land defenders scroll against recorded forest sounds in Kulagu Tu Buvongan’s multichannel sound installation.
Aside from Espina and Kulagu Tu Buvongan, the exhibition is also joined by Doreen Chan, HASS Lab, Billy HC Kwok, Linda Chiu-han Lai, Jaffa Lam, Leung Chi Wo, Ghislaine Leung, Berenice Olmedo, Nibha Sikander, Wing Po So, Takis, Tang Kwok Hin, with atmospheric interventions including a publishing project by Wing Chan, featuring photography by South Ho.
Installation view of the exhibition at Para Site.
Throughout its six-month run since March, the ‘signals...瞬息’ series have explored politics and economies within and beyond artmaking. The first chapter ‘signals...storms and patterns’ (18 March–28 May) focused on self-organisation and the politics of space in contemporary artmaking, while the second chapter ‘signals...folds and splits’ (10 June–30 July) reflected on the temporality of artworks and alternative economies of time. Finally, ‘signals...here and there’ explores diasporic flows and migratory strategies to think about contemporary global issues through the lens of Hong Kong.
Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications, and discursive and educational projects aimed at forging critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society.
The exhibition is on view at Para Site Hong Kong until 29 September 2023.
