Daphné MANDEL: Their Memories

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Gallery EXIT presents ‘Their Memories’ by Daphné MANDEL, featuring a new series of works by the Hong Kong-based French artist. Positioning herself as an observer, for many years MANDEL has been engaging with her adopted city’s past. Exploring villages in the New Territories and collecting stories from local villagers whose lifestyle is on the brink of disappearing, she explores the themes of pattern and repetition versus singularity and uniqueness through the narratives of rural life and industrial heritage.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is greeted by a long row of small paintings from the Their Memories series. Seen from a distance, these paintings drawn from formal family portraits, photographs of casual friends and family gatherings and occasions, weekend excursions and travels abroad form a repetitive pattern of shapes, shades of sepia, browns and greys, evoking a cycle of lives of a people who have left their rural village homes and their memories behind. Only when scrutinised up close do the individual stories become discernible. As the artist wanders around abandoned homes in rural villages, she often comes across photo albums that have survived several decades in a decaying and humid structure, the photographs within turned into a palette of browns, sepia, pinks and yellows. Time, material deterioration, the artist’s intervention and act of painting, transform the ephemeral images into the abstraction of a memory.

Opposite, ‘Landscapes Don’t Retain Memories’ is a deconstructed patchwork of abstract shapes from a cadastral survey of rural squatter villages, traced by the artist based on a government land survey. Some of these houses have already been demolished their memories are represented by fragments of photographs found by the artist inside these abandoned homes. The contours of the structures are displaced, scattered, perforated like splashes of ink or pieces of an organic puzzle of lives intersecting. New memories replace previous ones on the same land, yet landscapes don’t retain memories.

The Industrial Artefacts series illustrate soy pots, pallets, jerrycans and sand bags that represent the traditional industries still in operation in these villages, very much unchanged since the 1950s. A reflection on the paradoxical and anachronistic urbanscapes at the edges of Hong Kong, ‘The Record is Still on the Turntable’ is a collage of these small pockets where old Hong Kong architecture and traditions survive among frenetic development projects, along the margins and fringes, the spaces in between where the artist looks for traces and remnants of the city’s rural landscapes in transition.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Daphné MANDEL (French, b. 1975) has been living and working in Hong Kong since 2008. She completed her degree in architecture and urban planning in Versailles in 2000. MANDEL explores the in-between spaces that fall neither into the rural nor the urban. They are the fringes, the transitional landscapes at the edges of Hong Kong. Her artworks incorporate contemporary digital support and tactile traditional techniques, like painting and collage. This conceptually echoes Hong Kong’s urban aesthetic: one that is a juxtaposition of old and new, heritage and contemporary, derelict and polished. Her works are often infused with aesthetics of illusions, fantasies and poetry. MANDEL’s works have been exhibited in Taipei Dangdai (Gallery EXIT, Taipei, 2024), Art Basel Hong Kong (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2022, 2023 and 2024), ART021 (Gallery EXIT, Shanghai, 2023), ‘Hong Kong Time Rift’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2022), ‘Small is Beautiful XXXIX’ (Flowers Gallery, London, 2021), Photofairs Shanghai (Pékin Fine Art, Shanghai, 2019), ‘Shek-O Sublime’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2019), ‘Hong Kong Dimensions’ (Blue Lotus Gallery, Hong Kong, 2018), ‘Hong Kong Vanitas’ (Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, Hong Kong, 2017), etc. MANDEL co-founded the Paris based landscape architecture and urban planning firm Gilot & Mandel Paysage. Together with her partner, she was awarded the ‘Best Young Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture Professionals’ by the French Ministry of Culture in 2006. Daphne Mandel co-directed with Guy Bertrand a short documentary film entitled Cha Guo (茶粿) that celebrates the hidden world of a Hong Kong rural village. The film Premiere will take place at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on 27 November 2024.