ACAB (All Cats Are Beautiful)
ACAB, together with several cultural workers from Hong Kong, initiated Global Uprising Footprint (G.U.F.), a documentary project that seeks to generate stories about recent global uprisings. G.U.F. is a platform for shared experiences and solidarity, and a step towards building a network of alliances among those who face social and political struggles and internal conflicts within their own movement organizations. Her zine series Siu2La3Ba1 documents the history of Hong Kong’s Anti-ELAB (Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill) movement through archiving protest songs, chanted slogans, and video games that emerged during the movement.
G.U.F. -- GLOBAL UPRISING FOOTPRINT
Initiated by a group of artists in Hong Kong, G.U.F. seeks to generate a collection of stories about recent global uprisings. It is a platform for shared experiences and solidarity, and the first step towards building a trans-local network of alliance among all those who face not only the same social and political struggles, but similar internal conflicts within their own movement organisations.
…ex’d… is a video platform of works created by Hong Kong artists using photography, video, sound art and text, and consciously straddling the realms of documentary witnessing and visceral response during one of the most critical periods in Hong Kong history. Individually, these deeply personal works articulate moments in the increasingly urgent trajectory of civic action in Hong Kong, from the Umbrella Movement of autumn 2014 to the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests that began in the summer of 2019. At the same time, from within the new landscape of 2020 marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and political crackdown, ...ex’d...sheds light on the stark reality of the wounding of the personal and collective landscape of Hong Kong as the voices raised in protest were ignored and resisted, and policies created to ultimately silence them. What yesterday was legal and tolerated, today is criminalized overnight.
Ex-pressed, ex-posed, ex-cised, ex-pelled, exed-out…
The artists of …ex’d… have chosen to erase their own names in an inverse gesture of protest. Let the works speak for themselves.
(Special thanks to V.C. Doran in collaboration with ACAB and various artists)
Siu2la3ba1
Siu2la3ba1 (pronunciation “siu la ba”) is a zine series that documents the anti-ELAB movement through the collation of protest songs, chanted slogans, and related video games.
Anti-ELAB movement is the longest protest action in the history of Hong Kong. There were a plethora of protest songs, slogans and video games that emerged during the movement. These sounds are transient and self-initiated, they exist only in the memory of the protesters. Many online video documentations of protest sounds and protest-inspired video games have already disappeared due to the National Security Law implemented in July 2020. Siu2la3ba1 attempts to trace their provenance and characteristics, for the sake of record-keeping and further research.
Issue #1
Issue #3
all cats are beautiful by Valentina Hramov
ACAB (All Cats Are Beautiful)
All images courtesy the artists.