A Collection in Two Acts opens on July 16 through September 16 at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong. Curated by Chris Wan, the exhibition utilises the private collection of Yuri van der Leest to present two frameworks of collectorship: one is institutional, such as museums and archives — treating artworks as files to be dealt with under a given context of art history; the other is personal, like a private collection built with artworks as repositories of memories and personal encounters. Through the use of critical fabulation, the two modes of art collecting are juxtaposed to raise a question about the structure and agency in the art system. ‍

Critical fabulation, coined by Saidiya Hartman in her essay Venus in Two Acts,means a semi-fictional and semi-true fabulated narrative. Drawing reference from this concept, Collection in Two Actsfabulates two art-collecting subjects by dividing the gallery into two exhibition halls, and displaying artworks collected by van der Leest over the past seven years in two disparate formats. The display of Hall 1 invokes a sense of public organisations, where art is collected for exhibition, educational, and research purposes to offer narratives about the past and present. Exhibits are aligned with their finishing date, each with their annotation — however, in addition to rigidly formatted information about titles and medium, artists’ own writings are included in the published material. By introducing the human component to the documentation of art, artists are given more autonomy to how their works are archived. The current method of documentation is thus questioned: has the power of institutions superseded the individual? Who is the subject in history?

Gallery address: 11/F, M Place, 54 Wong Chuk Hang Road