Burger Collection is pleased to announce the launch of a three-year exhibition and research project developed and realized with 1a space, an independent artist-run organization in Hong Kong.

The project will open in May 2013 with the multi-disciplinary exhibition I Think It Rains at the heritage site of the Cattle Depot Artist Village in Hong Kong. Its major components will consist in artist residencies, panels and workshops, as well as the production of ephemera and a catalog documenting the yearlong productions. I Think It Rains brings together artists, writers, and critics invited by Burger Collection and 1a space in a tentative of creating a cross-disciplinary collaborative model. The exhibition will emphasize the multi-faceted practices of the participating artists and writers ranging from mixed-media work to installations, pseudo-writing, or radio-programs, and the like.

Early gatherings between Burger Collection's curatorial team and 1a space addressed the question of how to create a meaningful context of presentation, at this juncture in time, for diverse artistic approaches of a more experimental nature. Plotted as a platform for sustainable activities, an overall time frame of three years was set. Within this frame, the project aims at developing one possible mode of collaboration, connecting a local and an international organization. Burger Collection is now actively involved for the first year to allow for the development of basic parameters for the collaboration.

I Think It Rains will take place on the premises of the Cattle Depot Artist Village, a heritage site located in the old town center of Kowloon and a unique venue for alternative works to happen. The exhibition will consist of new and existing works by artists from Hong Kong and abroad, spreading out in the various spaces of the Cattle Depot including parts of the public outdoor areas. A full day of performances and happenings on May 24 will take place inside the Cattle Depot and in the adjacent urban area of Mong Kok.

The title, I Think It Rains, is borrowed from the homonymic poem by Nigerian poet and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. Rather than circumscribing a topic or theme, the title points to some of the motifs of the project: a sense of physical actuality and sensuality, of details and multiplicity, of a continuous present, of a porous quality of space as well as of the relations between the imaginary and the material.

Image: © Alain Kantarjian, 1a Space