What About Home Affairs: Influential Video Artist Ellen Pau’s Life and Politics

Description

Ellen Pau’s first retrospective takes visitors on an in-depth tour of her innovative, multi-faceted works that span three decades. Ellen Pau: What about Home Affairs? features eighteen of Pau’s most representative works from the late-1980s to the present, including selected single-channel video productions, a new augmented reality work, archives as well as a series of unpublished photographs. Recurring themes in Pau’s practice are gender issues, historical violence, local politics and social changes.

The exhibits will be displayed from a media archaeology perspective – through the development of technology, rather than following the traditional chronological order.

An active spokesperson advocating for the development of media art in the city, as evidenced by her co-founding of Videotage (Hong Kong’s oldest artist collective), Pau (b. 1961) has exhibited extensively worldwide in film festivals and art biennials, including the 1990 Hong Kong International Film Festival. During her thirty years of practice, Pau has continually experimented on alternative viewing experiences through the lens and explored the values inherent to technology and its modes of communication in daily life.  By the early 1990s, Pau began to incorporate sculptural elements and ambient sounds into her video installations and developed a unique visual language that portrays subjectivity through digital media.