15 Invitations
Asia Art Archive
233 Hollywood Road
Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
Asia Art Archive marks its 15th year by extending 15 invitations to creative practitioners to look within and beyond the organisation as an archive, a collection of material, a digital platform, and a node in a wider collective network. The 15 Invitations will take various sizes, forms, and directions—literary, polemic, political, sonic, physical, and digital—and function as a series of “drop pins” to alternatively navigate where AAA originated and where it may be going. AAA’s e-journal Field Notes will trace the 15 participants as they contribute notes and entries to document the process, resulting in a final print publication.
April–May, co-presented with Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC)
AAA’s 2014–15 resident artist Marysia Lewandowska contributed Property, Protest, Commons, and the Alternative Economies of Art, a series of public workshops co-organised with curator Esther Lu, leading towards Made in Public, a collectively generated project and publication. Participants interrogated the relationship between art, property, protest, and the commons in the context of recent cultural and political events in Asia. A third workshop takes place at TCAC 18–20 September.
June–July
Hong Kong–based artist Samson Young moves through various locations in and around AAA by way of a roving sound station—doubling as a bookmobile and deejay booth—to generate a series of public broadcasts. His project AAAFM99.3 invokes classic radio programmes with news announcements, interview segments, and commercials incorporating ambient noise sourced from AAA’s audio collection, focusing on the in-between to parallel past and present.
August–September
AAA Public Programmes Curator Ingrid Chu explores the international phenomenon of the “art book bag” ina short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them). Using the last 15 years as a guide, the exhibition features “the things that go in them”—art publications, magazines, and related ephemera—alongside a vast array of these popular totes in the AAA Library. Chu invites artists, curators, art book fair organisers, and print and online publishers to provide insight into the changing modes of knowledge production and circulation, and their influence on the recent art of Asia through Field Notes.
November
Zoe Butt of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, and facilitator of AAA’s 2011 Mobile Library programme in Vietnam, contributes a text to AAA’s e-journal Field Notes. Butt looks at friendship as a platform that is integral to the longevity of particular kinds of arts infrastructure. Concentrating on those considered independent, “alternative,” and archival in spirit, Butt simultaneously investigates a method of working strategically under conditions with political or cultural restrictions.
December
Udlot Udlot is organised by Hong Kong-based independent curator Inti Guerrero to present works, short films, and artefacts in the AAA Library. His intervention is based on different possible ideological readings of Udlot-Udlot, a 1972 large-scale sound performance by Philippines new-music composer José Maceda (1917–2004) documented in AAA’s Roberto Chabet Archive.
Future invitations include Hu Fang and Zhang Wei, Walid Raad, Rashid Rana, and others. The programme continues through 2016.
Asia Art Archive’s 15-year anniversary programme is generously supported by the S. H. Ho Foundation Limited and the C. K. & Kay Ho Foundation.
Asia Art Archive thanks the following for their support:
Marysia Lewandowska: Foundation for Art Initiatives (FfAI), National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF), Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), and Spring Workshop. Graphic Design Partner: Luke Gould, London.
15 Invitations Graphic Design Partner: Hani Charaf, Kemistry Design
AAA is supported by The Hong Kong Arts Development Council. 15 Invitations is part of the ADC 20th Anniversary Celebration Series.
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With an international Board of Directors, an Advisory Board made up of noted scholars and curators, and an in-house research team, AAA has collated one of the most valuable collections of material on contemporary art in the region—open to the public free of charge and increasingly accessible from its website. More than a static repository waiting to be discovered, AAA instigates critical thinking and dialogue for a wide range of audiences via public, research, residential and educational programmes.
