Loading Events

In Search of Miss Ruthless : Screening Programme & Closing Events

Date
Sep 10, 2017
Time
1:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Para Site invites you to join us on the last day of the exhibition, In Search of Miss Ruthless, for a curator tour, a screening programme, launch of a gossip magazine, and the unveiling of the crown.

 

Curator Tour
1:00pm
Cantonese

 

Pièce Touchée
3:00 – 5:00pm
Facebook event page: https://goo.gl/Nw8LbL

Para Site presents a special screening programme, Pièce Touchée, guest curated by Alvin Li. Composed of moving-image works by Tao Hui, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Wang Haiyang, and Shen XinPièce Touchée organises works that have undergone experimental editing, informed by affective experiences of queerness and femininity. This program takes its title from Martin Arnold’s canonical work made in 1989, where the artist reconstructed and extended an obscure 18-second short from 1950s Hollywood movie into a 15’36” film. By protracting the individual frames from the original scene, Arnold exposed the performative gestures and emotional cues that lay hidden in the actors’ choreography. Following this seminal critique of gender codes in Hollywood cinema, Pièce Touchée examines the manipulation of the melodramatic form—from fairy tales to literature—and proposes a rubric for choreographed queer life.

 

Closing Reception and Unveiling of the Crown
5:00 – 7:00pm
Facebook event page: https://goo.gl/XtSwtJ

Dear Miss Ruthless,

To mark the closing of our first attempt to find you through In Search of Miss Ruthless, we have built a community to welcome you. To prove to you we are a community capable of holding a pageant, participating artist Jes Fan is making a crown to be unveiled to the public. Ruthless Director of Communications Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin will be our Masters of Ceremony for the afternoon. She will be launching The Ruthless Lantern, a magazine she has produced that examines the qualities of ruthlessness and its usage for the future. In taking pageantry as method to organise our narratives in contemporary art, we are left with an attachment premised on adaptation and resilience.

We hope you will be among us on this date, marking the last moments before we take down the stage at Para Site, and continue our search for you elsewhere.

Yours truly,

Hera Chan and David Xu Borgonjon, Curators

 

 

Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Pilot Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The content of these activities does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

About the curator of Pièce Touchée

Alvin Li is a writer, translator, and queer activist based between Beijing and Shanghai. Li is currently English editor for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). Particularly interested in queerness and its implications for community practices and social relations, Li has been organising queer film festivals, monthly screenings, and community events in Shanghai for three years. Li is the co-founder of an unrefined queer underground collective in Shanghai named CINEMQ, known for its club-hopping screening program. In addition to their curated short film screenings, CINEMQ would throw badass parties and publish weekly articles on queer screen culture. Li is the co-curator of The New Normal: China, Art, and 2017, a large-scale group exhibition held at UCCA from March to July 2017. Li’s writing has appeared in FriezeArtreview AsiaRandianLEAPartforum.com.cnModern Weekly, among others.

About Miss Ruthless

Miss Ruthless is a fantasy figure of popular support that can represent “our beautiful Hong Kong up on the world stage,” as sung in Hong Kong Our Home. The search for Miss Ruthless began at Para Site in the summer of 2017. Drawing on the depths of diasporic souls and taking pageantry as method, Miss Ruthless is international and her presence is writ in universal history. Following poet Helene Cixous, we ask of Miss Ruthless: What if she were alive? What if, in looking at her, we animated her?

Website: ruthless.international
Instagram: @ruthless.international
Facebook: facebook.com/ruthlessfans