30/6/24

Curator’s note When you see the world through a peripheral lens, when you occupy a position of marginality, or when you are a minority, your voice, alongside many others, annotates the center. We argue against it, we challenge it, we respond to it, we enrich it. The margins are abundant. On February 26, 1997, the exhibition Being Minorities — Contemporary Asian Art opened at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Curated by Oscar Ho, while Hong Kong was in a pre-Handover haste of identifying a clear and distinguishable local culture, Being Minorities was the first art exhibition in the city to address its ethnic minorities. Yet, it was unable to present Hong Kong artists of different ethnic origins: “We had difficulty identifying artists from these communities, probably because the local art environment provided little infrastructural support for artists from ethnic minority communities to develop and grow.”

Today, 27 years later, first- and second-generation Hong Kong artists with roots in South and Southeast Asia are slowly emerging in the city’s arts spaces. But beyond the confines of institutions, extending outside their heavily gatekept walls, our cultural practices have been teeming in richness and abundance for decades. Grounded on the foundations of Being Minorities, marginalia (notes from the peripheries) is an exercise in expanding the definitions of “art” and “artist” through the margins that we inhabit, culturally, socially, economically, and politically.

Marginalia are “notes written in the margins of a text.” The exhibition’s title strikes parallel between these intensely personal annotations to the center and our voices and perspectives as migrants and immigrants. marginalia is thus a collection of annotations, additions, responses and reflections from those who have occupied marginal positionings or who work with materials and practices deemed peripheral. It is a celebration of ways of creation that is found in our homes and places of gathering, learnt from friends and elders, and rooted in the routes of our migration. Fifteen artists, collectives, and migrant and labor groups present new artworks and public programs that use textiles and found materials; music and dance; food and cooking; film and video; print, drawing, and painting; and many other ways of expression, to reflect on the diasporic experience in Hong Kong.

Some works reference festivals and folklores derived from the artists’ homelands, while others map, trace, and uncover migration histories and marginalizing practices here in the city. Existing works by two Hong Kong-based collectives will populate Current Plans’ kitchen and dining area, which visitors are encouraged to add onto throughout the show. In its totality, marginalia reclaims the margins as a site of possibilities instead of limitations. But it does so while asking: Whose minority? Whose periphery? Whose contemporary? Whose art history? Through whose lens do we define ourselves and our work, and should we?

marginalia (notes from the peripheries) is a project organized by curator Nicole M. Nepomuceno (Ning-Ning) and exhibition manager/producer Faith Monsod. Participating artists, collectives, and cultural groups: Arnel S. Agawin Xyza Cruz Bacani Residents of Bethune House Grassroots Future Guhit Kulay Begha Nanda Kumari Gwo Bean Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers Union (IMWU) and United Indonesians Against Overcharging (PILAR) Ani Phoebe Pop & Zebra Katrina Leigh Mendoza Raimann Angelique Santos Rajat Sharma Sharu Binnong Sikdar and Dhafney Dela Cruz Pineda Chandramaya Sunwar Fashiel Tamimi with the dancers of the Panay Overseas Workers Association (POWA)