We are travelling to Hong Kong to participate in Art Basel | Hong Kong Collective Magazine Booth and hosting a talk at Asia Art Archive’s Open Platform initiative on ‘Vernacular and the Citystate.’
Art publications from around the world display their magazines in single-magazine stands or the collective booth. Editors and publishers are often present at the show and many magazines contribute presentations to our Salon series, a schedule of presentations, lectures, and discussions by a range of speakers
Since THE STATE’s inception, our central questions have been: How do you speak a place? Who speaks, and in whose vernacular? Can cultural production have terroir?
We’re interested in the social and material conditions specific to city-states like Dubai and Singapore, and how they affect cultural production. These conditions include proportionally high levels of state and corporate sponsorship, stringent visa regulations, rapid urban transformation and its attendant compression of time and space, and their positions as global hubs that make them magnets for financial and cultural capital in the region. Both cities are also built on racialised mandates which privilege certain ethnicities over others. Along with high expat populations and a reliance on devalued foreign labour, this creates tense negotiations of citizenship, belonging, and identity.
Much of the work produced today in Dubai or Singapore (and perhaps Doha, Kuwait or Hong Kong too) feels like it could not have possibly been produced anywhere else. Aesthetic comparisons between Dubai and Singapore—as land art on a city scale, as the lifeworks of Lee Kuan Yew and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum—are often made, but rarely fleshed out. At the Open Platform 2014, we would like to interrogate these unique conditions and how they are reflected in art and cultural production. Language and vernacular, including Singlish and Khalinglish, are especially relevant here, as is the idea of producing at yesterday’s margins that may well become the centres of tomorrow.
What do these cities really have in common with each other, and can we forge new direct connections and solidarities that do not need to be pipelined through old imperial centres? By bringing together artists, writers, and publishers we hope to generate a rigorous discussion to elucidate these new models and territories, not in relation to the West but entirely on their own terms.
Participants
Rahel Aima, editor, THE STATE
Amanda Lee, writer and editor at Esquire Sg, Poskod, and Ceriph, as well as Eastern Heathens and Ministry of Moral Panic
Lantian Xie, artist
Raja’a Khalid, artist and writer
Qinyi Lim, curator, Para/Site
When? Sunday 18 May at 3.30-5 pm
Where? Booth P1, Art Basel, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
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