Freedom swimmers,
3 of 18 blocks of paper,
27 x 27 cm,
720 pages of image and text print on paper
#1 Exhibition
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The Landskrona Foto Resident 2016 was artist Elva Lai (Ming Chu) from Hong Kong. Elva Lai was born in China in 1989, but grew up in Hong Kong. Her journey from China to Hong Kong gave her a special relationship with migration and memory, which shows in her work.
This exhibition juxtaposes the escape of Syrian refugees and the escape stories of refugees from China to Hong Kong in the 60s and 70s. This juxtaposition share an understanding of our current rapid population movement and how close we could relate ourselves to another culture and history. |
By looking at the detail of escapes experience of refugees, we may be able to realize the fragility of our living situation and how modernization and liberalism give us an illusion that we are offered choices in life.
These two refugee histories seem unrelated and computer technologies seem to change lots of details of how a human escape from a nation to another one. However, at the same time, advanced technologies increase the security system in every aspect, harm our freedom and putting a certain group of people in legal limbo. The experience of refugees in both histories show the coincidence of unchanged hardships of being a refugee, regardless of time and cultural background. Another focus is about us, about how we react to them and think about the notion of giving and talking. |
