NOVEMBER AT LINGNAN CULTURAL STUDIES: Workshops, Talks, Screenings THE FUGITIVE IMAGE SAATH-SAATH: MUSIC ACROSS THE WATERS, 2018 COSMOPOLITANISM, REBELLION AND SEXUAL CITIZENS – AN EVANS CHAN RETROSPECTIVE WELCOME TO NOVEMBER 2018 marks an epochal moment for the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University. We have just concluded a year of celebrations for the 50th Anniversary of Lingnan’s establishment in Hong Kong, including an inter-disciplinary lecture series on Culture and Society co-hosted with the Hong Kong Arts Centre; installations, screenings and seminars under the rubric of The Performing Archive, in collaboration with Asia Art Archive; and musical explorations under the Cantonese Opera project and the ongoing India-Hong Kong-China performances. Continuing on what was initiated in the previous months, we are delighted to host an exciting line-up of events through the month of November 2018. Crossing disciplinary and institutional boundaries, engaging with performers, artists, film-makers and scholars, these events showcase the best of critical and creative thinking related to cultural practice. The events will be held at Lingnan University and at our partner institutions: Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and the Arts, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Para Site Gallery, Hanart Gallery, and Asia Art Archive, thus assembling a network of performative locations that will resound all month long with the sounds, colours and words of our programmes. Put together with help from Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, the three nodes of November at Cultural Studies are The Fugitive Image; Saath-Saath: Music across the Waters II; and Cosmopolitanism, Rebellion and Sexual Citizens- An Evans Chan Retrospective. For registration and enquiries, please write to [email protected]. We look forward to welcoming you at these events. Tejaswini Niranjana Head, Department of Cultural Studies THE FUGITIVE IMAGE Curated by: Ashish Rajadhyaksha In partnership with Tai Kwun Contemporary, Asia Art Archive and Para Site Images represent historical epochs in complex ways. Famous images through the twentieth century are known because they make immediate meaning, which can travel and become significant anywhere. In recent years however, many of the most crucial images of our times are hazy, incompletely transparent; where their ability to be meaningful dependent on how meaning is made of them, by whom, and in what circumstances. Their value arises as a site-specific co-production between the image, its maker, and its viewer. _____ Impossible Images For all the mistrust in the idea of documentary truth, in recent years the documentary image has received a new lease of life, finding a new power with which to inform, interpellate, instruct, govern. ‘Media realisms’, proposes Hito Steyerl, increasingly underpin their truth claims through a ‘politics of spectacle, speed and intensity’. In many ways this realisation takes us back to the origins of several New Cinema movements across Asia: to a generation of films made more or less simultaneously in East, South East and South Asia, using grainy footage taken in real conditions, in available lighting: where reference to the ‘real’ was as much to their actual production context as it was to cinematic realism. This is a two-session workshop, coinciding with the presence of the filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang at Tai Kwun Centre, with a focus on the image and its relationship to truth, and is a part of the Film and Cinema Studies course being offered at Lingnan University. I Workshop with Ackbar Abbas: Second New Wave Taiwanese Film Thu/Fri Nov 15-16, 2018, 10 am-12 noon, A Hall Studio, Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts (For registration: https://www.taikwun.hk/en/learn/detail/second%20new%20wave%20taiwanese%20film%20intensi ve%20with%20ackbar%20abbas/231) II Tsai Ming-Liang Screenings Thu Nov 15, LBYG01, Lingnan University 2 pm: Rebels of the Neon God (1992, 106 min) 3.45-6.10 PM – Stray Dogs (2013, 135 min) 6.15-6.45 – Walker (2012, 25 min) III Talk by Ackbar Abbas: Art Film Hour: Filmic Landscapes Tue Nov 20, 7-8.30 pm JC Cube, Tai Kwun Centre (For registration: https://www.taikwun.hk/en/learn/detail/art%20film%20hour%3A%20filmic%20landscapes%20with %20ackbar%20abbas/230) _____ Heritage, Repatriation and the Site-Specific Image Occasionally, images taken during intense political struggle literally incarnate the familiar dictum of an image speaking a thousand words. More often, however, both the image itself, and the thousand words it condenses, are locked in a far more complex struggle of intelligibility: where the relationship between image, time and context both hides and reveals a simmering history of practice beneath. In this workshop, around 15 participants, from artists to theorists, speak for around 30 minutes about a single image that captivated them in some way. Emerging Art Professionals Workshop, Para Site Gallery Sat Nov 17, 14.00-14.30/Mon Nov 19, 15.00-18.30 _____ Chronology, Classification, Notation – Performance in the Long Run I Talk by Linda Lai, ‘Remembering a Performance’ Wed Nov 28 7.30 pm, A Space, Asia Art Archive In July 1989, a performance work took place at the Sheung Wan Civic Centre. Titled Object-act-ivities, it comprised a series of improvised actions with objects and body movements, as artists from the visual arts, literature, and dance created a space of mourning following the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests. In 2006, in a project titled LOOK: Object-act-ivities, and more recently in 2016 in a project with students at the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong, titled Object-Subjectivities, Lai attempted to reconstruct the 1989 performance. Using various notational means, from chronological classification to textual transcription, the projects opened new ways by which incomplete and fragmentary documentation could be reconstructed through forging new relationships with past events of history. Lai’s talk will include clips of a video documentation of the original Object-act-ivities event of 1989 acquired from the artist Choi Yanchi, alongside subsequent reconstructions. The video is part of thecollection of the Out of Context Research Project at AAA, which focuses on the art ecology of Hong Kong during the 1980s. This talk is one of a series of programmes at AAA that inquire into the history of performance art and its relationship to archives. It is also part of The Fugitive Image, a series of events initiated by the Department of Cultural Studies of Lingnan University, which investigates the circumstances under which images conceal and reveal their latent content. II Workshop by Linda Lai: ‘Objects and Stories: Remembrance and Narration of the Past’ (Part of the Lingnan University course by Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan, ‘Narrating Hong Kong’) Thu Nov 29, 3-6 pm, MBG07 Lingnan University “If narratives are taken as those tales which treat what happened to Hong Kong as a place in relation to what its people want as a community… then their core is the question of desire”. The Narrating Hong Kong course looks for for traces of hope, fear, anxiety, ideology as well as imagination. In this open workshop, Linda Lai works with participants to discuss how the archive and the everyday can sometimes come together with large political histories. Assuming that archives are not always, and not even necessarily, large institutional repositories, this workshop explores how an archive may be created even from the everyday, how its contents may be notated, classified and how new chronologies for the present may be put together. ______ Linda Lai Chiu Han is a Hong Kong-based artist, working at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. In 2004 she founded the Writing Machine Collective, a Hong Kong-based new media art group, and in 2010 she started the art collective Floating Projects, now a site for interdisciplinary and intermedia art experiment. She has participated in various international art, experimental film and video festivals and art events. SAATH-SAATH: MUSIC ACROSS THE WATERS, 2018 Curated by: Tejaswini Niranjana At Lingnan University, Hanart Gallery and Asia Art Archive In partnership with Hanart Gallery and Asia Art Archive Supported by Moonchu Foundation and Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme About Saath-Saath This is a series of musical collaborations across India and China. The two traditions go back to ancient times, but are seemingly incapable of collaborating because of basic differences in the practice. Their apparent musical incompatibility signals, in a microcosm, why these two ancient cultures often appear incapable of a conversation. The collaborations enabled by Saath Saath – which has to date included classical singers from India, musicians and performers from Kunqu opera, instrumental performers on the pipa and yangqin, and practitioners of Cantopop – begin with a different presumption: that the connections may well be found in the way each tradition encounters modernity. Major issues from the social sciences get translated into conditions of practice when musicians encounter questions like: what does improvisation mean in modern times? When do traditions become ‘fixed’, and what happens when their fixity, or their underlying beliefs, are challenged? Does a focus on the practice of music, including here literally the condition of its rehearsal, open new possibilities? What does skill mean in the present? What do modes of performance and musical teaching styles in India and China tell us about how we relate to our everyday worlds? Musical Collaborations: Bindumalini Narayanswamy, Chow Yiu-Fai, Ip Kimho, Joyce Tang, Mitche Choi (Chin Shan), Omkar Havaldar, Rutuja Lad, Zhang Yi Accompaniment: 陳一凡 Chen Yi Fan, Jorge Ramiro Monroy, 麥嘉威 Mai Jia Wei, Sachin Olkar, 蕭穎 芝 Siu Wing Chi, 孫迪飛 Suen Tik Fei, Pamela Consultants: Li Siu-Leung, Yu Siu Wah I Sonic Negotiations: Notes in Practice Sat Oct 20, 3-6 pm, Hanart Gallery, Pedder Building 4th Floor, Pedder Street, Central Musicians and scholars from India and Hong Kong together explore the question of ‘practice’ (riyaaz in Hindi) which is common to all musical traditions.