From the mundane materiality of the curtain as a domestic object and its scenographic functions in various cultural contexts, Curtain makes artistic and conceptual references to passages, frontiers, separations, connections, occupations, circulations, and localities. Presented across two venues, at Para Site’s home and at a temporary site in Hong Kong, Curtain includes existing and newly commissioned works as well as site-specific interventions by 24 artists. Conceived as a framework to disrupt our usual habits of consuming visual culture, the exhibition also activates the viewer’s senses through acts of crawling into, lifting, peeking through, being guided by smell and sound, by reading, writing, and feeling a space. Furthermore, the fluid concept of “curtain” is a device not only to trigger the beginning or end of a spectacle, but also as a way to frame the subtle interactions and intimacies of the body as it passes through social and political representations.
A domestic object as well as technological screen, a “curtain” is used to facilitate or cloak the dissemination of information: from newspapers, photographic documents, to mass-manufactured moving-images; from solid walls to fluid boundaries; from light to shadow. It also acts as a fabric that shifts the divide between one’s personal and public personas. The “curtain” is a mutable concept used to contemplate questions of visibility and invisibility related to surveillance, forgotten histories, and geopolitical delineations. Its existence reveals displacements in language and material conditions in contemporary life that reflect changes in archival, social, and technological structures today. Moreover, the exhibition looks to raise awareness of alternative models as well as smaller-scale ecologies situated at the periphery of power structures dominating the façade of public everyday life. For the practitioners featured in Curtain, each work represents a retracing of memories or a path beyond the future, with the desire to influence informational infrastructures that govern or haunt a post-COVID-19 pandemic world.
Curtain is a continuation of the unique dialogue and partnership between Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, and Para Site, Hong Kong, beginning in 2019 with An Opera for Animals that premiered at Para Site, with a jointly curated edition travelling to Rockbund Art Museum subsequently. Curtain opens on May 14, 2021 at Para Site and on May 15, 2021 at a temporary exhibition venue in the Sheung Wan neighbourhood of Hong Kong.
Artists: Chantal Akerman, Xyza Cruz Bacani, Leigh Bowery, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cao Guimarães, Ho Sin Tung, Hu Yinping, Hu Yun, Derek Jarman, Shuang Li, Minouk Lim,Gustav Metzger, Ocean & Wavz, Jacolby Satterwhite, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Tan Jing, Robel Temesgen, Jason Wee, Cici Wu, Wu Jiaru, Stella Zhang, Jasphy Zheng, and Zhou Tao
Curators: Cosmin Costinas, Larys Frogier, Celia Ho, Anqi Li, Billy Tang, and Xu Tiantian
Collaborators: Biljana Ciric and Mathieu Copeland
Para Site
22/F, Wing Wah Ind. Building
677 King’s Road
Quarry Bay, Hong Kong
22/F, Soho House Hong Kong
33 Des Voeux Road West
Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
