Para Site Kickstarts the Summer with an Array of Exciting Programmes

Description

Para Site’s summer programme begins with two exhibitions, offering a platform for young curatorial talent in Hong Kong: Courses of Action in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, curated by Carlos Quijon, Jr, and The Bicycle Thieves, curated by Hanlu Zhang, at Para Site’s own space.

Courses of Action (14 June – 13 July 2019) articulates an alternative archive of interfacing between Hong Kong and the Philippines. ‘Action’ is understood simultaneously as behaviour, practice, mass movement and organisation, alongside fighting and engagement – referenced inaction films.

Taking its title from the iconic 1948 film by Vittorio De Sica, the exhibition The Bicycle Thieves (29 June – 1 September 2019) asks the question: could contemporary bike sharing platforms, (a concept once championed but now obsolete) be a potential solution to the tragic events depicted in the eponymous Neo-realist movie seventy years ago? The Bicycle Thieves converses with creators from various disciplines to image alternative systems and technological futures. The bicycle becomes a metaphor, describing and reflecting relationships between the individual and the technical object, referencing the original film to examine this idea in two different time periods.

The exhibitions are followed by the intensive 9-day Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals 2019 (8 – 16 October 2019). These workshops offers unique learning and networking opportunities with the industry specialist to curators, writers, critics, researchers, and other art professionals assisting them to advance and develop their careers. Held in conjunction with Para Site’s annual International Conference, the workshops sessions are mediated by conference attendees from across Hong Kong’s diverse institutional landscape.

Culminating the summer programme is Para Site’s 7th annual International Conference (10 – 12 October), organised in dialogue with the “Spinning Triangles” project. Initiated by SAVVY Contemporary on the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the project seeks to challenge and act against the inherent, neo-colonial power structures in design practices, theory, and teaching. Starting from the reality of Bauhaus as a school of design and recognising it as a solution and also as a problem, “Spinning Triangles” aims to reverse and reshape it and to propose a school of design that may well become an “un-school.” Para Site’s International Conference further invites leading theorists, academics, critics, writers and producers from around the world, to engage and gain from each other’s research, and share with Hong Kong’s audience their own critical perspectives.