Goethe-Gallery Until July 31
Hong Kong Film Archive Until July 19

Notions of authenticity, fidelity and originality permeate Culture(s) of Copy. Co-presented by Goethe-Institut Hongkong and Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany, the follow-up exhibition to 2008’s History Will Repeat Itself again embraces postmodernity and celebrates the end of singularity with an intriguing mix of (mainly media) artworks from around the world.

The impossibility of the existence of faithful narrative recounts is made abundantly clear by Berlin-based Israeli artist Omar Fast’s three-screen video installation, Talk Show (2010), which welcomes the visitors near the entrance of the Goethe-Gallery. Recorded in front of a live audience at Performa 09 in New York, it combines the childhood game of Chinese whispers with the television talk show format, beginning with a detailed recollection of Lisa Ramaci, the widow of American journalist Steven Vincent, who was kidnapped and killed in Basra, Iraq, in August 2005. At just over an hour long, the piece plays witness to the blurry line between reality and fiction as six other celebrities – Rosie Perez, Jill Clayburgh, Tom Noonan, Dave Hill, Lili Taylor and David Margulies – take turns to listen to the story and immediately recite it, with varying degrees of success, to the next participant in line. As the narrative unravels, poetic licences are invoked and irreverent jokes creep in, it is the small discrepancies from one telling to the next that most fascinate. The mention of the 1981 movie Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, for instance, is recalled as “some stupid movie”, and then “a Western or Will Smith movie” by the next.

In fact, fun might have been the most logical starting point for many of the works on display. The photographs of Hong Kong artist couple Leung Chi-wo and Sara Wong, taken from the ongoing series He was lost yesterday and we found him today (2010), see the two masquerading as negligible figures on the fringes of historical photographs. The playfulness that these works demonstrate in appropriating history – in one, Wong re-enacts a woman scratching her back, taken from a 1955 photograph from Japan; in another, Leung pretends to be a local reporter during the 1967 riots, taken from a newspaper clipping – is echoed in a very different way across the room in Kremlin Doppelganger. In the photo series (2008), Austrian artist Anna Jermolaewa separately captures the sceneries of the Red Square in Moscow and the Kremlin Palace Hotel in the sunny Antalya, Turkey – an architectural doppelganger of the Moscow original – and display them in pairings to humorous effect. The viewers are told in the accompanying 21-minute video, dated 2009, that 70 per cent of the hotel’s guests are tourists from Russia, because “they are interested to see how Moscow looks in Turkey.”

Such headlong decline of our cultures’ emphasis on uniqueness is provided a sharp, and much more personal, counterpoint by Berlin-based South African artist Candice Breitz’s Factum (2009), exhibited with six other video artworks at the Film Archive’s exhibition hall. Displayed as a diptych of two high-resolution flat screens, the Kang sisters Hanna and Laurie are shown side by side as they describe intimately their family history, their sexual desires, their religious guilt, and the identity crisis inevitably shared by both. Working to similar effects as the Robert Rauchenberg paintings that it’s named after, Breitz’s piece gives us an immediate impression of sameness (the sisters are sitting in the same setting, dressed in the same clothes and decorated in the same nail polish and nose rings) before slowly revealing the subtle differences through the viewer’s heightened awareness over its 69-minute duration: the moles on their faces, the small differences in their uncannily similar monologues. It culminates into an emotional revelatory moment when the two reveal the large tattoos on their arms; such is the destiny of identical twins that one of these overly symbolic markings, unthinkable as it sounds, turns out to be the graphic of a stereoscopic camera: a machine designed to take two simultaneous, slightly off images to produce special visual effects.

But it’s not all miserable being “copies”. Somewhat predictably, hilarity is in abundant supply in this parade of doubles. In the nine-minute video, Real Snow White (2009), Finnish artist Pilvi Takala is denied entrance to Disneyland Paris by the security guards while dressing up as Snow White. After being told that she was “not to mix with the real characters working here”, the artist replies: “I thought real Snow White is a drawing.” More preposterous pranks can be found in Chinese artist Xu Chen’s eight-minute video 8848-1.86 (2005), a mockumentary on the artist and his two friends’ expedition to saw off 1.86 metres – which happens to be Xu’s own height – from the peak of Mount Everest. Narrated by the artist with full-on deadpan humour, the work – which consists of cellphone-shot, severely pixelated image projected onto an oversize screen – earns chuckles as a mockery on universally held believes: the commonly recognized height of Mount Everest, if artists are to be believed, would be 1.86 metres less than 8,848m from now on.

For an exhibition scattered with impostors, doppelgangers, twins, tricksters, alternative history and virtual reality, it is remarkable how the concept of authenticity ends up connecting the diversity of works on display, underscoring the vibrancy of their very own originality in the process. The content of the works might be utterly fake; yet their wealth of irony – and inspiration – is undeniable.

Edmund Lee