Hong Kong-based curatorial office and gallery Mur Nomade presents ‘Recollections’, a groupexhibition by three female artists – Ana González (Colombia), Ivy Ma (Hong Kong) and NastaranShahbazi (Iran) – opening on October 10th, and on view until December 24th. A newly createdshort story by writer Cally Yu complements the exhibition. In literary form and through the media ofetching, porcelain, embroidery, painting and video, the exhibition deals with the subject of memoryin post-trauma contexts.
The three visual artists are concerned with life after tragedy, and express personal reflections onhistory and remembering: Ana González and Nastaran Shahbazi present works in Hong Kong forthe first time, accompanied by selected pieces by local artist Ivy Ma, well-known for her explorationof the relationship between reality and memory.
Feminine and delicate in form, the works are infused with strength and commitment. The first part ofthe exhibition, intentionally dense and stifling, is a silent conversation of art pieces dealing with death, oppression and intolerance. It opens on a wider second section that considers memory andexistence after displacement, war and loss, with an imagery of children’s dresses, solitary figures,empty spaces and reborn nature. The circulation in the exhibition space invites the visitor to roamback and forth between both rooms, in a movement resembling the cycles of destruction andrebirth through history: we are reminded to remember.
Behind Nastaran Shahbazi’s unfathomable etchings is the influence of the Surrealists and the ideathat all things change and pass. Born and raised in a country home to one of the world’s oldestcivilizations, hurt by decades of armed conflicts and political repression, the Iranian artist letsdespair and solitude float over her images, like the traces of tarlatan cloth she left on the pair ofenigmatic etchings that attracts the eye as one enters the exhibition space. The thin clothsymbolizes fragility, but it is also a reference to censorship. Shahbazi’s controlled techniquecontains her boiling resentment for intolerance: her indignation is in the details.
A muted scream against dogmatism is also found in Ivy Ma’s ‘Birds’, a video drawing from the lastscene of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1929 film ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’. On the opposite wall hangs‘Last Gaze’, based on a still from Georges Franju’s 1949 documentary film on slaughterhouses, onwhich Ma added paradoxically glamorous golden dots and filigree of colours that one can onlynotice at a close distance. Standing between ‘Birds’ and ‘Last Gaze’, the viewer experiencesmemory with his or her body. The process of layering of images is found again in ‘Hands 005’, awork based on a documentary photograph the artist came across with at a war museum, out ofwhich she enlarged a detail and let it become an over-sized oval framed painting. Ivy Ma’s videosand paintings are the works of a story re-teller and they fill the room with an insistent feeling ofpresence: it is the presence of the past.
The exhibition gathers works from Ana González’s ‘Pass I Flora’ series, exemplifying her versatileuse of both fine art media and crafts. Talking about life after tragedy and displacement, the seriestake nature as a symbol of mending and healing. Shaped in porcelain, embroidered or painted, agirl’s dress appears again and again in the works on display, inspired by the Sunday mass dressesof child victims of the drug war in the artist’s home country, Colombia, and other Latin Americancountries. The passiflora flowers covering the dresses represent for Gonzalez the ‘cycle of pain anddeath that gives way to new ways of life and transformation.’ Similar flowers grow rhythmically in theaudio-video work Mutatio II, created collaboratively with composer Miguel Carrillo Samper, andbased on 340 drawings on paper and a developing drawing made along the crack of a wall.
In their creative methods, all three artists use processes of (re)collection and repetition. The acts ofcollecting or recollecting take the form of people’s recollections of the past through interviews,digital photographs turned into photogravure, re-photographs of documentary material at warmuseums, appropriation of stills from films. Repetition happens through etching and the gesture ofprintmaking, layering and re-printing of found images, and the obstinate recurrence of a pattern.Along this line, the exhibition invites the viewer to reflect on the endless repetition of acts ofoppression through history, the marks added layer after layer to the unconscious collectivememory, and the seemingly inability of human kind to learn from its mistakes.
‘Half-winged Dragonfly’ by Cally Yu is a creative and personal response to the underlying themesof the artworks on display in ‘Recollections’. The short piece of magical realism is sweepinglyuniversal yet deeply anchored to Hong Kong social and political context. The multiple layers ofmeanings of the text echo the strata of images of the art pieces. With a touching tribute to women,Yu juxtaposes the sublime and the trivial, in a pictorial short story about transformation after trauma.
Mur Nomade would like to thank art writer Stephanie Bailey for her perceptive and insightfulintroduction on ‘Recollections. The text can be found in the brochure available at the exhibition.
NOTES TO EDITORS
About Aná Gonzalez
Born in 1974, Ana González lives and works in Colombia. She received her B.A. in Architecture atUniversidad de los Andes in Bogotá in 1997 and a Master in Editing at E.S.C.P / E.A.P. (GrandeEcole) in Paris in 2001. She also participated in the exchange program Ple Impression-Multiples ofthe Paris Academy of Fine Arts (ENSBA). She received the Award for Best Bi-dimensional Work atSalón de Agosto, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Bogotá, Colombia in 2006, and was a finalist ofthe Prize for Best Pictorial Work, Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy in 2007. Her workhas been exhibited in more than forty collective and solo exhibitions since 1995 in Latin America,Europe and the U.S.A. Ana González’s works are collected by museums in South America and inthe U.S.A. and they are in private collections all around the world.
Ana González makes artworks in the media of drawing, painting, photography, video, installation,embroidery and porcelain. Looking into inherited culture, collective memory and narrations ofdisplacement, her art practice is based on her experience of listening carefully to people andartisans who have been displaced by armed conflicts and migrated to cities. Her interest inhandicrafts and family traditions, and her passion for investigating women’s life and perspectivefrom an artistic and scientific point of view have been her recurrent inspirations.
About Ivy Ma
Born in 1973, Ivy Ma is a Hong Kong visual artist specializing in mixed-media works and a lecturerat the Hong Kong Art School. She obtained her B.A. in Fine Arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute ofTechnology in Australia in 2001 and a M.A. in Feminist Theory and Practice in Visual Art atUniversity of Leeds in the UK in 2002. She was the recipient of the Young Artist Award, Hong KongContemporary Art Award, Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2012. She has had eight solo exhibitions inHong Kong and Japan since 2001, including ‘Last Year’ (2015), ‘Numbers Standing Still’ (2012)and ‘Gazes’ (2011) at Gallery EXIT (Hong Kong), and ‘Someone’ (2014) at Goethe Gallery (HongKong).
Cultivating an aesthetic characterized by quietness and stillness, Ivy Ma’s work becomes,ultimately, a philosophical reflection on nature and history. She works her way through history bylooking, collecting, drawing and thinking. The objects she collects, the images she selects, and theoccasional photographs and videos she produces all strike a similar chord, one that is at uncanny,disturbing and beautiful. Through her early sculptures and installations, she developed a sensibilitytowards scale, texture and light that now informs her two dimensional work. Starting in 2010, shebegan focusing on images – both stills taken from specific films and photographs found in historymuseums – for an ongoing series of what she calls ‘drawing-interventions’, where she activelyerases and draws into and over the existing image.
About Nastaran Shahbazi
Born in 1982, Nastaran Shahbazi is an Iranian artist, living between Paris and Hong Kong. Sheproduces etchings, drawings and paintings. She first trained in graphics in Tehran, then studied inFrance, where she graduated in Motion and Graphic Design at Gobelins l’Ecole de I’Image in Parisin 2009 and received her Master in Visual Arts at Paris 8 University in 2010. She was a member of the Etching studio at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris between 2009 and 2014. She startedexhibiting in 2004, and has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Iran and in Europe.Imbued with mystery, Nastaran Shahbazi’s works range from delicate yet unsettling monochromaticetchings, to bold and vividly-coloured expressionist paintings. They deal with war, oppression anddisplacement, and at the same time, they are personal expressions of loss and despair.
About Cally Yu
Born in 1968, Cally Yu (Yeuk Mui, Yu) is a Chinese writer with a strong concern on Hong Kongcultural and social development. She published four novels and one book collecting interviews onthe topic of ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ with 12 women. She has also produced poems, theatretexts, art critics, interviews and feature stories for newspapers and magazines since 1997.
Starting in 2009, she has been experimenting with different visual art elements, body movementsand text, in theatre production and social happenings. Cally Yu was one of the writers-in-residenceof the Hong Kong section in Liverpool Biennial 2012 and critic-in-residence of Macau City FringeFestival 2012.
About Mur Nomade
Mur Nomade is an art space in Hong Kong, operating as both as a curatorial office and a gallery.Our name is the French translation of ‘nomadic wall’. We present site-specific projects in selectedvenues all around Hong Kong, in addition to regular exhibitions at our gallery space in the up-and-coming South Island Cultural District. We work closely with local and international artists, curators,art writers and teachers to imagine and conceive exhibitions and programmes such ascollaborative art projects, performances, workshops and residencies.
Mur Nomade focuses on projects encouraging cultural exchanges and creative encounters. Welike bold ideas and we are convinced that cultural exchanges support creativity, stimulateemulation and encourage experimentation
