50th Venice Biennale — Navigating the dot

Date
Jun 13, 2003 – Nov 2, 2003
Location
Castello 2126, Arsenale
Ramo della Tana, Venezia

Chan Kai Yin, Jasper Lau Kin Wah, Jeff Leung Chin Fung, Janice Leung Wan Yee, Tim Li, Evelyna Leung Kan Yee Woo, Phoebe Man Ching Ying, Tamshui, Kith Tsang Tak Ping, Sara Wong Chi Hang, Anthony Yeung Ngor Wah, Yeung Yang

 

Para Site Collective is a team of artists, architects, curators, critics, designers, educators, and researchers. The Collective generates ideas through discussions through meetings, emails, telephone calls, sketches, photographs, and models. Indeed, in an actual world intensely linked up by virtual spaces, how do we orient ourselves? How can we respond? 

In the borrowed time and borrowed space in the Venice Biennale, the Para Site Collective continues to play the role of a facilitator. Always already both GLObal and loCAL, Para Site Collective builds compartments in the Hong Kong exhibition site to interrupt the Venice Biennale sight and site. What kinds of interruption are possible? Will the compartments serve as resting places, docks, temporary shelters, dwellings, or little theatres for visitors? The meanings are up to the visitors to imbue, for seeing, walking, smelling, touching, and listening are all creative acts, let alone engaging in dialogues and indulging in dreams. For the Collective, these compartments offer multiple possibilities and starting points for interrupting the visitors’ familiar experiences. The exhibition site of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong, China is to become a visitors’ site where boundaries are blurred. Visitors, as much as the members of Para Site Collectives, are at home everywhere, yet nowhere at home. 

The horizontally and vertically placed cylindrical compartments are borrowed time and borrowed space on another level, for they provide timely resting places for visitors after an exhausting journey of art touring. Thus the compartments become a space for dreaming and daydreaming. Visitors are encouraged to navigate their path in the artwork and, of course, navigate their dreams in whatever posture they find comfortable. Upon navigating their route in the artwork the visitors experience the frustration and joy of floating, disorientation, lost, and found. The fluidity of the artwork reflects the Collective’s thoughts of navigating Hong Kong in the international art arena. 

 

More materials are available to view on site at Para Site. 

Click here to see a full inventory of all archive materials and contact us at archive@para-site.art for enquiries, to request an appointment to view materials, and for archival materials donations.

 

The Archive Project is financially supported by the Project Grant of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

 

 

Exhibition flyer and artist biographies (2003/ex_9/box 13/1)

Exhibition catalogue (2003/ex_9/box 5/14)

Exhibition catalogue (2003/ex_9/box 5/3)

Exhibition Pamphlet (2003/ex_9/box 20/15)

Exhibition poster (2003/ex_9/box 18/18)