Connective Video Art: Hong Kong’s Ellen Pau Meets Berlin’s Klaus vom Bruch

Description

Vom Bruch is recognised for exploring the boundaries of the personal and the national, and the banal and historical. Two of his selected videos in Connective Video 4/6, Das Alliertenband (1982)and Das Duracellband (Duracell Tape, 1980), exemplify this practice. By inter-cutting between commercial, close-ups of the artist himself and World War Two footage, vom Bruch challenges commonplace perspectives on past events.

Ellen Pau’s videos share thematic and stylistic similarities with vom Bruch’s, despite the geographical and cultural distance between the two artists. Pau’s Diversion (1990) and Song of the Goddess (1992) use existing visual material, archival footage of a swimming contest in the 1960s in the former, and excepts of a Yam Kim-fai/Bak Shuet Sin film in the latter, to negotiate with the complicated colonial past and the ambiguous sexuality representation in popular entertainment respectively.