Para Site
Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals 2024: New Flows
Selected as one of the 13 participants for the Para Site 2024 Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals.
Culminating in a public gathering at The University of Hong Kong, Small Acts/ New Flows.
Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals: New Flows is a laboratory for emerging arts professionals to reflect on the arts ecosystem and their role and agency within it. Adopting a circular model of exchange, leading figures in the field will host exchanges and workshops in Para Site’s Learning Space alongside off-site visits, interrogating the ethics of art work, diasporic solidarity, collaborative models, institutional forms, and sustainable futures. Facilitators include Adeline Ooi, who has directed initiatives to position Hong Kong, and Asia more broadly, into a crucial art world meeting point; Mai Abu ElDahab, director of Mophradat, a non-profit association supporting artists from the Arab world, generating inventive approaches to funding, commissioning, collaborating, and gathering; Guangzhou-based artist collective BOLOHO, now participating in CHAT’s Seed to Textile programme; Cem A, the artist behind @freeze_magazine; and Sakiya, a progressive academy connecting art, science, and agriculture in Palestine and beyond. Throughout, participants will consider the idea of professionalism after professionalisation and explore ways of practising together.
The participants are Amandine Vabre Chau (France/Hong Kong), Emilie Sin-yi Choi (Hong Kong), Jeremy Ip (Hong Kong), Tomoya Iwata (Japan), Amy Jones (UK), Linh Lê (Vietnam), Arianna Mercado (Philippines), Hue Nguyen (Vietnam/Taiwan), Kiko del Rosario (Philippines), Putri Siswanto (Indonesia), Yuji de Torres (Philippines), Binghuang Xu (China), and Bishal Yonjan (Nepal).
PUBLIC GATHERING :
How can the arts participate in developing practices and cultures of sustainable worlding within the context of global capitalism and its attendant crises?
Small Acts / New Flows: A Public Gathering invites audiences to hear from and engage with facilitators and participants from two interconnected programs hosted at Para Site in September and October 2024: The Alternative School: Small Acts, a four-week artist-led syllabus of public workshops focusing on ecology, and Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals: New Flows, a week-long series of closed-door exchanges on the politics and ethics of institutional labour and sustainability in the arts.
Taking small steps as actions that embody the common saying, the only way out is through, Yip Kai Chun will introduce the Inter-Island Festival (Hong Kong), reflecting on what forms an alternative school can take, while participants from the Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals will offer their reflections of what an arts ecosystem is and could be. Bridging both programs are two roundtables with Alternative School and Workshop facilitators. First, BOLOHO (Guangzhou), Chloe Lai of Urban Diary (Hong Kong), and Lo Lai Lai Natalie and Zimu Zhang of Wanwu Practice Group (Hong Kong), will discuss planting as a form of placemaking that resonates with the collecting of community stories. Then, Wayla Amatathammachad of Prayoon for Art Foundation (Thailand), Sahar Qawasmi and Renad Shqeirat of Sakiya (Palestine), and Niko Leung and Kevin Lin of Hong Kong Soil by TMML Studio (Hong Kong), will consider how land and water are shaping counter-models for co-existence today.
Closing the day, Vincci Mak (Hong Kong), Senior Lecturer in the Division of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, will offer closing remarks, while inviting audience members to offer their own closing reflections via open mic.
Supported by the S. H. Ho Foundation Limited and Art History School of Humanities, The University of Hong Kong.
My deepest thanks to the entire team at Para Site, Stephanie Bailey and Alice Wong.