Stories from Places and Times Distantly Close
Cinema Suitcase and Will KwanNovember 21 – January 16, 2010 | Opening: November 20, 2009 8PM
- images > 1 2 3 4
- Clocks That Do Not Tell The Time, 2008.
- Wall clocks, metal signs
- Courtesy the artist
Will Kwan Artist Talk: Thursday, November 19th, 2009 7PM, Luxe Hall
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver
Western Front Exhibitions and Media Arts are pleased to present Stories from Places and Times Distantly Close, the Vancouver premiere of works by internationally recognized media artists Cinema Suitcase and Will Kwan. At a time when the existing economic system has arguably proven itself unsustainable, this exhibition offers a closer look at the seemingly distant places and times where the consequences of free global trade can be felt in tangible and direct ways.
The video documentary Colony (2006) by Cinema Suitcase examines a crumbling outpost of the Bata Shoe Company in Batanagar, India. Envisioning a world where no one need go bare foot, the Czech industrialist Thomas Bata set up “Bata Colonies” where company-sponsored schools, hospitals, and recreation centres structured workers’ social lives. Today, Batanagar is in a state of disrepair. Unable to compete with cheap labour outsourced to the poorest of countries, Bata Colonies’ utopic-yet-paternalistic beginnings are fading into a distant memory.
In his multi-media installation Canaries (the bank and the treasury) (2007), Will Kwan connects the contemporary Hong Kong-nese diaspora to the history of the HSBC Bank. Formerly the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC was founded in 1865, after China’s defeat in the Opium Wars forced an unequal foreign trade agreement. The establishment of the bank in the newly acquired colony of Hong Kong played an integral role in ensuring the expansion of the British Empire.
Kwan’s Clocks that Do Not Tell the Time (2008) further a discussion of economic disparity in global trade by presenting clocks indicating the local time in such places as toxic dump sites, factory towns, corporate head offices and military headquarters.
Through different narrative methods, the artists highlight what is often left unspoken in discussions of global economy, as well as the colonial motivations that seed such disparate trade relationships.