After more than a year of global slowdown and restricted mobility, the artists and choreographers Scarlet Yu (b. 1978, Hong Kong; lives in Berlin) and Xavier Le Roy (b. 1963, France; lives in Berlin) examine the notion of stillness in Still in Hong Kong, a performative proposition developed in collaboration with 22 performers who currently reside in Hong Kong. The word “still” holds multiple meanings as it refers not only to something “motionless” but also“quiet” or “calm”, as well as “up to this time”, “nevertheless”, or a “frozen excerpt of a moving image”

Taking up this multiplicity, a performer addresses the visitor to engage in an encounter, and shares a personal collection of “stills” that are made of actions, postures, stories, and extended into conversations. The collection of “stills”, created in dialogue with Yu and Le Roy, are embodiments of a series of individual and collective memories, experiences, and relations of and with Hong Kong. Within the context of the exhibition, Yu and Le Roy bind their understanding of stillness with a twisted meaning of sculpture. In doing so, they question sculpture’s alleged properties: What materials are they made of or composed with? What remains of them when they have been removed or destroyed? How does their presence linger? How do they traverse both the public and the private? In an engaging exchange of showing, telling, and conversing, the body is revealed as a permeable vessel and a generator of physical and mental images and imaginations that travel both in time and space. Inspired and driven by the conflation of trust and confusion, Yu and Le Roy set out a choreographic situation which questions the traditional divides between object and subject, the organic and the synthetic, movement and stillness, performer and spectator/visitor. In this alluring exchange, the performer and visitor transform uncanny moments into precious encounters.