“An Opera for Animals” at Parasite, Hong Kong
Para Site, the former artist-run space founded in Hong Kong in 1996 and one of the oldest art centers in Asia, is hosting a group exhibition inspired by classical opera and the animal kingdom, on view until June 9. Curators Cosmin Costinas and Claire Shea discussed the show with L’Officiel Art.
L’OFFICIEL ART: Could you tell us more about the idea behind the group exhibition “An Opera for Animals”?
COSMIN COSTINAS & CLAIRE SHEA: Classical opera, both from the east and the west, employs a number of devices that in some way mirror our contemporary reality, from its complex and sometimes implausible narratives to its artificial landscapes increasingly found in new technologies. We are also interested in looking at animals as devices of representation, from their mythical and the spiritual roles to their connections with anxieties about the future. The exhibition also considers how these animalistic representations can be found in works that employ operatic devices. For instance, Ciprian Muresan’s work Dog Luv is based on a script in which a conversation takes place between dog puppets discussing the history of mankind. Wang Wei’s newly commissioned work recalls the animal enclosures in the Beijing Zoo. This work recreates a scene from the pavilion of nocturnal animals, questioning the purpose of these artificial landscapes as a stage produced for their animal inhabitants or for their human observers.
What is the link between opera and colonialism? And how does this show address such a topic?
Historically, western classical music and operas were tightly connected to the colonial project. The exhibition is looking at how some of the elements of opera are linked with colonial histories. For example, Gala Porras-Kim’s large interdisciplinary project looks at the Zapatec language of the Tlacolula Valley in Oaxaca, Mexico; it is a tonal language where meaning is conveyed to a great extent through nonverbal sounds, making it possible to communicate with tones and whistles, a feature of the language that the indigenous population employed as a strategy of resistance to the Spanish colonizers. Porras-Kim’s works include a composition of whistling tones, on an LP album, accompanied by a number of drawings she has done with an ethnomusicologist – physical diagrams of different hand and mouth formations used to create different types of whistles as well as a series of scores. Another example of work showing this link is an operatic score by Mexican composer and musicologist Gabriel Pareyon, whose new opera Xochicuicatl Cuecuechtli is based on a Nahuatl poem from the 16th century collected from accounts following the conquest of Mexico, with a new score created specifically for a range of Native Mexican instruments. With this work, Pareyon has composed a distinctively new operatic structure, differentiating it from the European operatic tradition.
The exhibition is a prelude to a new partnership between the Para Site and Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. Could you give us any more details?
The first collaborative exhibition will open in June 2019 in Shanghai, as an extension of the March 2019 exhibition “An Opera for Animals.” The second collaborative exhibition will be back in Hong Kong in March 2020, as an evolution of this research and our discussions.
“An Opera for Animals.” Para Site, Hong Kong. Through June 9.