In 2009, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu asked Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, who were mostly women, to plant a bogus bomb in the spaces of their choice in the well-appointed houses they worked in. They also asked them to photograph each other with their backs turned. The piece was first exhibited in full at the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010. According to the biennale catalogue, “it addresses the emotions and issues underlying the relationships between Filipino workers and their Hong Kong employers, and examines the phenomena of migrant workers living outside of their home country, integrating themselves into the families and homes of others.”  The artists have produced provocative works using such materials as live animals, human blood, baby cadavers and fat tissue.

In this project, the classic tension between purity and danger emerges more potently because it intrudes on space in which another form of anxiety takes place: between intimacy and estrangement, anonymity (facelessness and uninhabitedness) and incursion. All this settles on an uneasy calm in the pictures of this project in which the workers stealthily smuggle in a toy grenade in the homes they keep for employers whose secrets, whose interior life, they probably know to heart. It is said that a third of the Philippine population is out of the country, keeping the economy on an even keel by sending back home around 18 billion dollars a year in remittances. The body of Filipinos is a ticking migrant force in the inner sanctum of their masters.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu will deliver a talk during the opening. The exhibition runs till October 29, 2011.