May 30, 2015

Translation(s) II: Translating the City


Translation(s) II: Translating the City
International video art project, 2015

Videotage, Hong Kong
14 June 2015, 17:00-18:30

Curated by:
Zoran Poposki and Laurence Wood

Participating Artists: 
Justin Ascott (UK) 
Damon Ayers & Tessie Word (US) 
Jean-Marie Casbarian (US)
Arch Dyson (UK)
Jessica Ledwich (AU)
Luis Lara Malvacias (US/VEN)
Eva Petrič (AT/SI) 
Michael Poetschko (DE/AT) 
Zoran Poposki (HK/MK)
Laurence Wood (HK/UK)

Translating the City aims to explore urban space and place through practice-based research in the medium of video, employing a variety of strategies and interdisciplinary approaches, from mapping and public space performance, to the exploration of spatialized identities, cultural memory, and cultural translation.

The artists invited to take part in this project reconsider the city as a space of negotiation and interchange between agents from different cultures, the scene of an ongoing process of translation. Justin Ascott explores the semiotic ‘afterlife’ of a metropolitan structure in terms of the possibilities of urban recoding, while Michael Poetschko and Luis Lara Malvacias engage with the city as a screen for desires and utopias. Wanderlust takes flight in Damon AyersTessie Word’s mining of their personal digital archives and Arch Dyson’s ludic commentary on the experience of global travel, while Jean Marie Casbarian’s work is a poetic meditation on migration and loss. Isolation embedded in the act of “looking at the city” from the perspective of the other marks Jessica Ledwich’s nocturnal urban landscape and Zoran Poposki’s appropriation of a piece of postmodern auteur cinema; whereas Eva Petrič and Laurence Wood take contemporary urban unrest as a metaphor for a much deeper symbolic struggle.

Translation(s) is curated by Zoran Poposki and Laurence Wood.

The screening will be accompanied with an introduction to the artists’ works by the co-curator of the project Zoran Poposki.

The first edition of Translation(s) was released in 2013 and was screened at international art festivals in Hong Kong, Slovenia, Denmark, Italy, and Canada.

Videotage is a leading non-profit organization in Hong Kong focusing on the presentation, promotion, production and preservation of video and media art, serving artists in the expanding technological art and culture network since 1986.