Akeroyd Collection
The Video Art programme will feature a curated selection of works from Akeroyd Collection, the moving image facet of the collection of Shane Akeroyd, a Hong Kong-based philanthropist and moving-image champion. Presented for one hour each day of the Fair, visitors can experience an exclusive showing of moving image-based works at Cinema Central. Akeroyd Collection operates to make the film and video work in the collection available through a dedicated website, film screenings, and loans to international arts institutions.
Stephanie Comilang (b. 1980, Canada)
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso, 2016
Single-channel video
25’55”
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016) is a science-fiction documentary that focuses on the lives of three Filipina domestic workers—Irish May Salinas, Lyra Ancheta Torbela, and Romylyn Presto Sampaga—who work and live in Hong Kong. The film explores how these women maintain connections with their families despite the physical distance. The film is narrated and predominantly seen from the perspective of ‘Paraiso’ a spectral mediary that embodies the emotional isolation and longing experienced by migrant workers. This disembodied voice, whose narration is heard from a drone’s POV hovering omnipotently above the Hong Kong landscape, explains her symbolic and practical function from the outset. She represents all displaced women, who have historically and ancestrally been disavowed of their place in society and whose strength enables them to gather resources and provide for their loved ones remotely. She is also a mediating technology in the most contemporary sense, and her presence works as a device to upload digital communications from the workers and transmit them across borders on their behalf. Part ghost, part server, Paraiso holds these women’s experiences and connections across time and space and simultaneously gives us a window into their world.
The documentary reveals how these workers transform the Central District of Hong Kong each Sunday into a space for community and solidarity, hacking the usually bustling financial area, by turning it into a site of radical care. This temporary transformation highlights the stark contrast between their weekday isolation, as they live and work in their employers’ homes and the brief moments of freedom and connection they enjoy during their Sundays off. It is also clear that it is only in their communion and collective power that Paraiso can pick up a strong enough signal to receive and send their weekly video content. The conflation of digital communications and spiritual practice reframes our understanding of technology. Community, ritual, prayer and solidarity are also collective technologies of communication. In an era when we might easily assume the benevolence of digital technologies, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso invites us to consider the violence of separation, isolation and the conditions of marginalised and exploited workers. In a world shaped by globalization and economic migration, and the compromised nature of public space both on and offline, of which our communications platforms are not innocent, other technologies are not only possible but essential.
Stephanie Comilang, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso, 2016, single-channel video, 25’55”. Courtesy of the artist and Akeroyd Collection
Rei Hayama (b. 1987, Japan)
A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects, 2009
Single-channel video
11’01”
A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects (2009) concerns death, ritual, and the lamenting of things lost. While this early work shows the emergent concerns of the Anthropocene, by looping a sequence of a young girl burying dead insects in a forest, it also works as a poetic and powerful allegory where we are to consider the death of film as well. Hayama notes how the burying of dead insects was just one of the ceremonies she developed as a child, which functioned for her to find a sense of order in a chaotic world. In the film, however, we see this ritual repeated over and over, and each time, the film stock is degraded through exposure and manipulation until the deterioration of the image drains all colour from the screen. The cycle becomes more abstract and illegible as the film progresses. This, in a poetically self-reflective way, articulates the film’s demise and offers the making of the work as a ritual of commemoration. The Single-8 film, a standard developed by Fujifilm in 1960 for home movies and consumer use, was discontinued in 2007. A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects both laments and celebrates the unique politics of vision that celluloid enabled in both a momentous and elegiac manner. This work places the cycle of life and death, nature and ritual in the materiality of the film itself, suggestive of a blurred line between animals and humans, man and technology. A rejection of an Anthropocentric dominance in favour of a worldview that posits everything is materially connected.
Rei Hayama, A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects, 2009, single-channel video, 11’01”. Courtesy of the artist and Akeroyd Collection
Shuang Li (b. 1990, China)
ÆTHER (Poor Objects), 2021
Single-channel video
18’28”
In ÆTHER (Poor Objects) (2025), Shuang Li combines images of a solar eclipse with those made by an extreme fisheye lens and illuminated by ring lights, commonly used by social media influencers and vloggers. The effect renders all footage in circular, ocular terms and unifies the material aesthetically and conceptually. This artistic fusion of natural and artificial rings of light serves to highlight the blurred boundaries between virtual experiences and physical existence, drawing attention to the interplay between the two realms as is a common endeavour within the artist’s wider practice. The title Æther alludes to the ancient concept of the fifth element, believed to occupy the space beyond the terrestrial realm, connecting all of us. By connecting the imagery of the ring light, a symbol of online culture and remote work, with that of the solar eclipse, Æther explores personal subjectivity within the context of an increasingly immersive digital landscape. Li’s work contemplates the reversed relationship between the body and its representation on screens, focusing on the concept of leakage and the imperfect transmission of virtual objects into physical life and vice versa. The script, written by the artist, evokes notions of evolution, gestation, and the spatiotemporal disconnection inherent in our social and technological conditions. Through the imagery of abandoned infrastructure, the artwork underscores the potential loss of genuine physical encounters as we become increasingly reliant on virtual realms. Delivered through the personas of a cam model and a mukbang vlogger, Æther’s presentation is at odds with classical Chinese philosophy on the body and being that the narrative draws on. This juxtaposition prompts a reconsideration of our own physicality within currently mediated circumstances. The work examines our own embodiment and its potential loss caused by the impact of technology on lived experiences.
Shuang Li, ÆTHER (Poor Objects), 2021, single-channel video, 18’28”. Courtesy of the artist, Peres Projects and Akeroyd Collection
Robert Sandler (b. 1991, USA)
Fatal loins, 2019
Single-channel video
07’28”
In Fatal Loins (2019), Robert Sandler plays both the parts of Maria and Tony from West Side Story. Dressed as two different clowns, Sandler re-enacts, shot for shot, the balcony scene and song from Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 adaptation of the film.
This labour of love, as a technically faithful and observant study of the film, is undermined by the presence of clowns fulfilling the roles of the characters. Much like a clown’s function, the scene is mimed, with the original audio present throughout. And as with clowns, their comedy and self-effacing status as figures of fun, thinly veils a sense of human tragedy and pathos. This additional layer of meaning is brought skilfully into the cinematic space and we are left to examine the sentiment of the story from an entirely other perspective.
Robert Sandler, Fatal loins, 2019, single-channel video, 07’28”. Courtesy of the artist and Akeroyd Collection
All film and video descriptions have been provided by Akeroyd Collection.
For more information about Akeroyd Collection, please click here.