A conversation with Richard Fung

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen
Friday 24 June, 2022 / 12.30 pm TT time / 6.30 pm Kassel time

 

Richard Fung is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video artist and writer. He joins Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier for an informal conversation about his current work in progress, centred on the late Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo, and questions of the local and the global.

Fung will participate from Alice Yard’s space at WH22 in Kassel, and Cozier will join him virtually from our home base at Granderson Lab in Belmont, Port of Spain. The conversation will also be live-streamed. All are invited to join — virtually online at Alice Yard’s YouTube channel or in person at Granderson Lab.

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Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto.

His work comprises challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS, justice in Israel/Palestine, and his own family history. His single-channel and installation works, which include Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians (1984) and its redux Re:Orientations (2016), My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Jehad in Motion (2007), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012), and Nang by Nang (2018), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada, the United States, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Fung’s essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002). He is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University.

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Blue Curry, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

 

Blue Curry is Alice Yard’s first artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 18 June to 2 July, 2022, he is based at WH22 in Kassel, responding sculpturally to other documenta fifteen artists and ideas. Working with co-curator Christopher Cozier, he is also instigating a revived version of the Out of Place project, originally presented in Port of Spain in 2016 — a series of actions by other artists, further extending the documenta fifteen exchange through our networks.

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Blue Curry (b.1974, Nassau, Bahamas) is an artist working primarily in sculptural assemblage and installation art who uses an idiosyncratic language of commonplace objects and found materials to engage with themes of exoticism, tourism, and material culture. He has exhibited at Tate Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Liverpool, SITE Santa Fe and Jamaica Biennials, the Caribbean Triennial, the Art Museum of the Americas, the World Bank, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Frost Museum and the Nassauischer Kunstverein, among many others. He is a graduate of the Goldsmiths College Fine Art MFA programme. He currently lives in London and works between there and the Caribbean.

He is also the director of Ruby Cruel, a creative space in Hackney, London.

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Alice Yard at documenta fifteen

 

From 18 June to 25 September, 2022, Alice Yard will participate in documenta fifteen, curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa.
 
Taking the lumbung — a communal rice barn typical in rural Indonesia — as a conceptual model, documenta fifteen is built around “principles of collectivity, resource building, and equitable distribution.”

When Alice Yard was invited to join the documenta fifteen lumbung and work alongside dozens of other collectives from around the world, the curators asked how we might “translate” what we do to a new physical location — the German city of Kassel — and a broader context.

What does Alice Yard do? For fourteen and a half years, from our founding in 2006, we were often described as an art space, based at Roberts Street in Woodbrook, Port of Spain. In February 2020, when we permanently relocated to Granderson Lab in Belmont, it was clear to us that Alice Yard is not merely a physical location, but a series of relationships and ideas, ways of thinking and working — not a project but a practice, not a programme but a process.

How do we translate this to documenta fifteen? Rather than inventing some unprecedented new spectacle, we have opted to do what we’ve always done: create a space, both physical and conceptual, to bring artists and others together to talk, experiment, exchange, and play, with an ethos of self-determination, generosity, spontaneity, and friendship.

During the 100 days of documenta fifteen, Alice Yard will host nine artists in residence at the WH22 venue, who will create and present site- and time-specific works and actions in diverse media at locations around Kassel. Building on relationships that, in some cases, stretch back to the earliest days of Alice Yard, these artists are:

18 June–2 July: Blue Curry
3–17 July: Luis Vasquez La Roche
5–19 July: Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Amanda Hernández
18–30 July: Shannon Alonzo
31 July–13 August: Versia Harris
14–28 August: Michelle Eistrup
29 August–10 September: Bruce Cayonne
11–25 September: Ada M. Patterson

We also look forward to welcoming other friends and collaborators to our space in Kassel for informal visits, interactions, and activations, some planned and some improvised.

Simultaneously, Alice Yard will present a series of works and actions in Port of Spain to extend the documenta fifteen conversation beyond Kassel.

During our time in Kassel, instead of concerning ourselves with whether or how an international audience may or may not understand our process, we prefer to ask ourselves: What do we make or do when no one is watching us? What do we talk about when no one else is listening?

The exact scope and content of our documenta fifteen participation are unknown to us now — these will take shape over the 100 days. To use one of our favourite phrases, there is no end in sight.

Follow us here and on social media, visit us in Kassel or Port of Spain, and join our conversation.

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