Data, sound and art combine to highlight gender disparity among Hong Kong domestic helpers
- Mona Chalabi and Emmy the Great’s inclusive mixed-media installation highlights the 65:1 ratio of female to male domestic workers in the city
- Work will show at the Spark festival at Tai Kwun this weekend
When best-friend power couple Mona Chalabi, a data journalist and illustrator, and musician Emmy the Great (Emma-Lee Moss) decided to make art together, it was only natural that they would create a project where their respective mediums – visual and audio – could meet.
But that was not the only inspiration for their installation “Migrant Workers: Seen and Heard”, which shows this weekend at the British Council’s Spark Festival of Ideas in Hong Kong.
Instead, the pair, who became friends after meeting in New York in 2016, wanted to use the festival’s “Science and Art of Creativity” platform to experiment with making statistics accessible, and inclusive, using sound.
It was a new approach for Chalabi, who is known for her simple and incisive illustrations of data on social issues. But it was one she felt was necessary to address after a visually impaired person asked her: “What does your work do for me?”
“The answer was honestly ‘nothing’ – my work excludes a lot of people,” says Chalabi, who works in New York but was raised in the UK.