When the Asia Art Archive invited the Raqs Media Collective from India to take part in its international residency programme, the idea was to allow the overseas artists to make use of its collection - 24,000 catalogued items from rare publications to images and videos - for an open-ended project. The exercise will focus mainly on the use of archives for arts research, but the three New Delhi-based artists want to take it further by spending the next four weeks examining how Hongkongers remember their past, using Kowloon's Walled City as an example.
Raqs members Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta will use materials from the archive to explore what Hongkongers remember about the Walled City and what they have forgotten.
'We'd like to investigate the possibility of using the archive to think about things that might have been neglected, forgotten, overlooked or barely glanced at,' Narula says.
The three artists say they are intrigued by the many layers of the site's history and are interested in charting the transformation of this dense urban area over time.
'The accumulation of lives, experiences, memories and histories ... are very rich depositories of ideas and images,' says Narula.
The artists also say they only learned about the Walled City from literary journals and online materials - which makes their upcoming research more challenging.