Alicja Kwade’s exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Pretopia, characteristically disrupts her audience’s sense of stability and fixed reality. Her sculptural installations play with different forms of perception—physical, philosophical and scientific. She reflects on our visual and bodily experiences, our awareness of and perspectives on the structures framing and shaping society, and the role of the invisible laws of physics. Born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland, Kwade studied in London and Berlin, where she now lives. Her Hong Kong show draws directly on the origins of the historic building that houses Tai Kwun Contemporary, the former Victoria Prison. At its heart is the installation Fear—Fusion, in which iron bars, evoking those used in the prison, are interspersed with mirrors and sculptures.
Time is a consistent concern in Kwade’s work and she continues a series involving clocks. In this case, a performer attaches a single clock hand to the gallery wall every weekend for the duration of the show, gradually encircling the room, mapping the space while marking time, just as a prisoner might during their incarceration. “It was about changing and transferring different measurement systems,” Kwade says. It is one way in which she reimagines and subverts the processes within which we root ourselves temporally and physically. “I try to make people uncertain about themselves,” she says.
The Art Newspaper: Is Pretopia a word you invented or did you find it somewhere?
Alicja Kwade: I cannot prove it, so I’m not sure! It started with a little brick, which I found on the desk of the former director [of Tai Kwun Contemporary] Tobias Berger when he invited me to do what was then a commission, in 2018. It had this imprint, ‘Utopia’. He told me that he found it during the renovation and the new construction and they were the original bricks, produced in Britain and shipped to Hong Kong to build the jail. I found it so obscure and ironic. To ship bricks from Britain [that say] ‘Utopia’ to build a jail: you could not invent this better.
I found it so obscure and ironic. To ship bricks from Britain that say ‘Utopia’ to build a jail: you could not invent this better
It was a brand name that wasn’t visible to the prisoners?
Yes, it was a coincidence. After that I had utopia on my mind. That was the history: the British coming to Hong Kong, building these Victorian buildings and trying to establish their idea of the world. And then establishing this jail, which in the beginning, of course, was just meant for Chinese people who did not behave. And then it changed, it was for everyone. So I thought about these historical events but also, to be honest, about what China is now and where they aim to go. I developed this title, which is something between utopia and dystopia. It’s about trying to do something which is meant to be for the good, but it depends on how you see it.
Pretopia, showing at Tai Kwun Contemporary, focuses on the effects of incarceration Jimmy Ho; Courtesy of the artist & Tai Kwun Contemporary
The building’s original purpose seems to have informed the entire body of work.
Absolutely. The whole exhibition is about the history of the building and the building of a history. It’s about different positions: who’s judging whom, who is right or wrong. It’s about the many different faces of truth, whatever truth is meant to be. It’s generally about social or political reality.
It connects to the notion of time, which you have explored through several works.
It was a funny experience in China, because they don’t want to express this as I do. Time is a topic in my work, but what I was trying to say is that there is no other place like a jail, where time becomes a tool of torture and is something you are taking away from people. This is the worst torture we can experience as humans because we are time-limited, right? [The museum] have been trying to turn it around a bit, saying more that it’s about the duration of time. Of course, if you take it less negatively, you can say it is about waiting—what is it? Is it a passive or active situation? Are you doing it or is it done to you? Is it blocking [people] from activity? And does being blocked from activity mean being blocked from life? Or being changed?
Fear—Fusion, which is in the F Hall space, seems to plunge the audience into that dilemma about time?
It was the original printing hall. They used to print newspapers there, which is also absurd. The British would print this free media news in the jail with the people being kept there.
The prisoners were employed on the production of a newspaper?
Yes, and print media in general. Happily, I got access to the original maps of the former jail so I could rebuild parts of the original structure. And by applying mirrors, it puts the viewer in a strange position, to not be sure where they are—in front or behind, leaving or entering. It’s questioning your own position of being free or not.
Mirrors are always metaphors in your work, aren’t they? Here, in the sense of literally a reflection, which suggests that in a different period, I might have been a prisoner here as opposed to a free person.
This is probably the most straight-on point. It’s also about losing your sense of your own position in a space. I have this struggle with mirrors: I hate and love them at the same time. I hate them in art because people love mirrors and they love to take pictures of themselves. It’s like a sickness. But somehow, because this is attractive—it’s so vain and so human—I cannot stop using them. We changed the whole shape of the space [in F Hall]. We built walls so that they overlap in the mirror, because it’s not a symmetrical space on its own. We made it symmetrical to make sure it perfectly reflects and divides the space, not in all positions, but in significant positions. You see yourself appearing and disappearing when you pass through it.
You said that one of the reasons time is a potent tool for torture relates to mortality. Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée has a quote: “If you see your whole life in a mirror, you will see death at work.” The mirror is about rooting us in mortality?
Absolutely. I don’t think we have a stronger symbol, at least in Western art, than a mirror. It appears in the [gravitas] works of the Netherlands painters, where they have the mirror in the back, which tells you that it is all going to end. Also, it’s ironic—probably even a little sarcastic—because you have all these people having fun with those mirrors, but then they appear and disappear. They’re just there for a moment, they are not consistent in the space. They cannot see themselves consistently because things are changing. They disappear and appear. Time as a topic is a tricky thing, because it’s very kitsch. It’s not that we’re interested in time because it’s an interesting physical force, as gravitation and electromagnetic fields are no less interesting. We are so obsessed with it as a theme because it matters to us directly, because we are time-limited.
• Alicja Kwade: Pretopia, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, until 6 April
