Framing Spatial Stories | Solomon Benjamin & Wing Shing Tang

A special programme series featuring exhibitions, projects, written works, performances, a blog, and publication marking Asia Art Archive's 15-year anniversary. AAA extends 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 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.

Instigated by what the Hong Kong Urban Renewal Authority (URA) terms ‘freezing surveys’—aimed at fixing legal claims to spaces (and thereby people) to frame cities as stable grids—'unfreezing' becomes a way to re-think and re-familiarise the relationship to cities we inhabit and travel across.

For the three-day workshop involving presentations, site-visits, Hong Kong city walks, and an e-dossier, a range of archives including the AAA collection and other everyday materials from the city will be brought forward for discussion. With participants ranging from students and artists to architects and academics, the project draws on the AAA collection; law and administration documents; street markings; publicly circulated print media; protest performance and installation documentation; the missing bricks in the pavements of Mong Kok; the use of umbrellas, banners, and dance forms; and interviews among other media.