The Unseen Visuality and Memorial Migrancy: documenta X in 1997 and Hong Kong now

Goethe-Institut Hongkong is pleased to support the research trip of Vennes Cheng at the documenta archive. To share her findings to a wider public on the early documenta exhibitions and the relationship with Hong Kong, Cheng will conduct a lecture at the Goethe-Institut on Friday, May 13, 2022.
 
Free admission. Registration is required: https://forms.gle/2R4ENqvqrxAQSy4b7

In the talk, Cheng will share her research in documenta archiv, which inquiries critical reverberation of documenta X on Hong Kong in 1997 and now through lens of visuality. The criticality and correlation of documenta X and Hong Kong inform not only the visual and spatial transformation of the city during its sovereign transition, but they also discern resonance to assert the spatial coherence in terms of visuality in the post 2019 protests Hong Kong. The spatial coherence that concerns visual erasure in the public spaces renders illusive harmony and stability and means to legitimate the authority.

The year of 1997 marked the significant turns of documenta at its tenth iteration and to Hong Kong.  Catherine David, the artistic director of documenta X, attempted to shift the quinquennial away from the aesthetic orientation and rendered the international exhibition a discursive and transition dimension to reflect global issues, such as colonisation, decolonisation, and globalisation at the turning point of the century. One of the global issues that documenta X concerned in 1997 was the sovereignty handover of Hong Kong and the official handover ceremony happened in the midnight of 1 July 1997.

The attendance to two Hong Kongers in Kassel for the exhibition in 1997 constitutes vantage of dialectical, historical, and aesthetics entanglements between the two places (Hong Kong and Kassel) and temporalities (1997 and now).  They are Ackbar Abba and Ha Bik Chuen; Abbas, then scholar at the University of Hong Kong, was one of the guests of the “100-day 100-guests” lecture series of documenta X; Ha Bik Chuen, the late Hong Kong modernist artist, visited Kassel and documented the exhibition and the cityscape of Kassel photographically in August 1997.  Their attendances constitute vantage of dialectical, historical, and aesthetics entanglements between the two places (Hong Kong and Kassel) and temporalities (1997 and now), which reveal visuality an instrument to demonstrate power and produce chimeric community.

The sharing will be followed by discussion with Professor Pang Laikwan, Cultural and Religious Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

VENNES CHENG

© Vennes Cheng

Vennes Cheng, Sau Wai is a Hong Kong-based scholar and Associate Curator, Hong Kong Visual Culture, M+. She received a Ph.D. of Art History from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and M.A. in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. Cheng’s research areas include modern and contemporary art of Hong Kong and China, artist archive, and historical and mnemonic contingency. Cheng gave talks about archives of Hong Kong contemporary art and curating histories at various occasions, such as Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018.  She was one of the selected emerging art professionals of Para Site in 2018. As the second holder of the joint fellowship by the Goethe Institut, Kunsthochschule Kassel and documenta archiv she spent three months researching resources of the documenta archiv and took part in the documenta studies project “to be dis_continued” exchanging with students, researchers and lecturers of Kunsthochschule.