ONLY A JOKE CAN SAVE US is Now Running at Sham Shut Po From Present Projects

Only a Joke Can Save Us is now running at Sham Shui Po from Present Projects through July 3, 2021.

The exhibition is from Bo Choy, FAMEME, Hu Rui, Cyrus Hung, Kensuke Koike, Kieran Leach, Mak Ying Tung 2, Pow Martinez, and Yan Xinyue. It is co-curated by Eunice Tsang and Tiffany Leung.

Embedded in manic laughter is a cry for help, a face perpetually contorted into the laugh-cry emoji. Selected as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year couple of years ago, ? was apparently the most used 'word' globally. Originally called 'Face with Tears of Joy', ? has quickly evolved to inhabit deeper complexities, encompassing helplessness, embarrassment, incompetence. Are the tears the result of unhinged laughter; or is laughter a front for bitter tears?

Humor is specific in its time and space; what makes us laugh reveals a lot about our immediacy, and the world here and now. It also reflects on the evolution of our cultures and endures in its infinite forms: satire, slapstick, irony, parody, memes and so on. Inheriting the nature of humour, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a complex, varied and rebellious account of our current times.

With this exhibition, we wish to explore humour as a way of understanding or questioning ourselves in an ever more unsettling world - our desires, fantasies, frustrations and resistance, riffing off everything from the familiar to the absurd.

Featuring ridiculed political figures, the banality of pigeons, dancing in a flood, playful instagram filters and more, these artworks will elicit laughter and offer comfort in bleakness; but also irreverently disrupt and transgress, creating radical resistance in times of uncertainty. Confronted by crisis and trauma, joking and laughing becomes a methodology to explore new conceptions of solidarity, critique and justice.

Learn more at https://www.present-projects.com/exhibitions-1/only-a-joke-can-save-us.

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