Another Odyssey

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Square Street Gallery is pleased to present Another Odyssey, a group show with Celia Ko, Ziyi Wang and Wong Winsome Dumalagan.

Drifting across restless seas while yearning for home, they finally arrive only to discover a jarring dissonance: they have become strangers in their own home. The homeland they remember exists only in memory; the person who left its shores exists only in the past, unmarked by traces of that journey. In this era of fluidity, we all embark on personal odysseys, perpetually negotiating our identities, carrying fragments of our origins while being irrevocably altered by our journeys. Another Odyssey brings together three artists who chart these migratory passages and their profound impact on selfhood. They invite us to linger in these transitory spaces and contemplate how migration not only changes our relationship to place but also reshapes who we are.

Ziyi Wang plunges us into the disorienting experience of transmigration. In Finding Pigeons (2023), Wang roams London’s streets with the unusual mission of conversing with urban pigeons in Beijing dialect. What emerges is a poignant meditation on cultural displacement. Wang’s video Land Sailing (2024) explores the complexities of cultural navigation as shaped by state authority, highlighting the tension between imposed national identities and personal cultural affiliations. Drawing from her experiences as a Chinese immigrant in the UK, the series captures her attempts to return from Paris after losing her Biometric Resident Permit, the only legal document that permits her re-entry to the UK. The narration shifts between English and Putonghua, further emphasizing the duality of her cultural experience.

Celia Ko’s Bubble Wrap series transforms family photographs into portals that both reveal and conceal the past. These meticulous still-life paintings capture family photos salvaged from a relative’s archive, each image a fragment of Ko’s ancestral history, showing relatives long departed. The photographs aren’t merely relics but vessels of narrative, stories reconstructed through her mother’s recollections and the artist’s own imagination. Here, we glimpse how family memory becomes a tether to the places we call home.

Wong Winsome Dumalagan’s Trajectory Portraits: Egret series captures the ephemeral poetry of movement across boundaries. In Trajectory Portraits: Egret 01, Wong follows an egret’s flight as it traverses from natural to urban space. Trajectory Portraits: Egret 02 extends this meditation through material transformation. Film stills from the video are developed in the darkroom and framed with acrylic engravings of additional stills, creating a fragmented portrait of motion. Wong’s installation Cave, the Hum, Gecko Eggs delves into the archaeology of abandonment and the ghostly residue of former inhabitants. The work originated from Wong’s discovery of gecko eggs nestled within an abandoned speaker, a chance encounter with the traces of life persisting in forgotten spaces. Wong’s installation invites us to consider the way spaces that retain the spectral imprint of their former inhabitants, and how the attempt to document such transitions invariably transforms what we seek to preserve.