The project will open in May 2013 with the multi-disciplinary exhibition I Think It Rains at the heritage site of the Cattle Depot Artist Village. It represents a further installment of the Quadrilogy, the collection’s own exhibition and research program.
Project Description
I Think It Rains brings together artists and writers invited by Burger Collection and 1a space from Hong Kong and abroad. It will take place on the premises of the Cattle Depot Artist Village, a heritage site located in the old town center of Kowloon. Plotted as a platform for sustainable activities, an overall time frame of three years was set. Within this frame, participants will develop one possible mode of collaboration, which connects a local and an international organization, both mindful of the cultural specificity of Hong Kong and of transnational currents of contemporary artistic practice. The three-year frame allows for the project to successively proliferate and branch out to a larger circle of artists and writers, but also to the local community or academia.
In its first year of activities under the roof of Burger Collection’s Quadrilogy, the project will, according to curator Daniel Kurjaković, look at “how artists have developed succinct ways to question the relationships between history and histories, cognitive patterns and social behavior in the present and impulses for the future. Artists have been keen on underlining the artistic process by using various sorts of research that seamlessly link or interestingly contrast different temporal levels.” I Think It Rains emphasizes the multi-faceted practices of the participants—from mixed-media work, to installations, pseudo-writing, or radio-programs, and the like. The exhibitions will present existing works from Burger Collection as well as new works and contributions from the artists and writers.
In the first phase from May to December 2013 participants will set up the key parameters for the collaboration: developing specific contexts for art practices and linking them with intellectual networks, building relevant bridges between practice and theory, and mapping necessary channels between producers and institutions.
Apart from the two exhibitions, some of the further components of the yearlong activities are artist residencies, panels and workshops, performances, multi-function project rooms as well as the production of ephemera and a catalogue documenting the process.
The title I Think It Rains is borrowed from a poem by Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka. It points to some of the motifs of the project: a sense of physical actuality and sensuality, of details and multiplicity, of a continuous present, of a porous quality of space as well as of the relations between the imaginary and the material.
List of contributors
Artists and writers: Bani Abidi, Fiona Banner, Pierre Bismuth, Muhanned Cader, Filipa César,Alejandro Cesarco, Enoch Cheung, Pak Sheung Chuen, Choi Yan-chi, Ng Ka Chun, Chow Yiu Fai, Ryan Gander, Florian Germann, Gao Weigang, Jon Kessler, Kingsley Ng, Kong Chun Hei, Lam TungPang, Lau Ching Ping, Vittorio Santoro, Fiete Stolte, Annie Lai-kuen Wan, and Cally Yu.
Core team members of Burger Collection and 1a space: Choi Yan-chi (artist), Enoch Cheung (artist), Linda Jensen (curatorial assistant), Daniel Kurjaković (curator), and Cally Yu (writer).
More information will be available in April on quadrilogy.org and on oneaspace.org.hk.
Contact
Inquiries are to be addressed to info@burgercollection.org.
About Burger Collection
Burger Collection is a private collection of contemporary art initiated in the mid-1990s with emphases in Euro-American, Indian, and Asian art. Currently, it includes more than 1200 works by some 200 artists. Since 2005 the works of Burger Collection are available for view at www.burgercollection.org. In 2009 the collection has begun its own exhibition and research project entitled Quadrilogy (www.quadrilogy.org).
