Voices Seen, Images Heard

A historian and interdisciplinary artist engages in a self-dialogue about how to write the history of her city, Hong Kong. Drilling the disparate mines of sights and sounds, she re-examines the power and limitation of ocular epistemology, which favors visual perception as the dominant form of knowing. As she makes her way through the scanty and homogeneous visual documents available, she re-imagines a city that has a precarious history of holding onto its look or preserving its architectural integrity in the face of real estate development. In response, she re-constructs a visual essay that is also a collage of lost surfaces and shadowy fragments of existence. Her meditation leaves open the potential meanings of each of the sight-and-sound fragments that seem to have spoken to her, asking how feasible it is to access the past.

Voices Seen, Images Heard is part of A City in Transmission: Five Works from Videotage, guest-curated by Doris Poon and co-presented with Videotage as the first installment of e-flux Film Histories of Video Art series.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com