In the exact middle of 1997 sovereignty over Hong Kong passed from Britain to the People’s Republic of China. During that year I took one black and white photo on every day (as part of a larger photo-documentation project that involved taking at least one photo every day from 1995 to 2000, a five year period centred around the handover). Digital versions of those still photos are presented here in strict chronological order, at the rate of twelve images per second. The entire year’s sequence is repeated ten times over.
Some of the themes that have interested me, and which this work relates to, are:
Creating images in one medium, then presenting them in another.
Exploring the possibilities of looping and repetition.
Turning an archive into an artwork.
Compressing time (in this case: a year in about a minute).
Investigating the different possibilities of viewing offered by different speeds of display.
Content as a glimpse (De Kooning’s notion).
Experimental documentary work – challenging conventions of documentary film and its photographic equivalent.
Treating the task of preserving and mobilizing historical memory as being of great political importance, and one in which images have as much a role as texts, but also discovering the liberatory potential at certain points of grinding historical traces down almost to dust. ‘Deconstructing’ or revisiting my own earlier use of photography as part of a memory-based resistance against textbook historical grand narratives.
Revisiting the Hong Kong handover moment with historical hindsight.
Seeing the handover of sovereignty as a process taking place over time rather than as a discrete event occurring in one moment.
Investigating liminality.