Edy Fung

diaries. monuments. memory.documentation. event. pandemic.archive. digital identity. encoding. decoding. commemoration. deja-vu.
always-already. burying shame. treehole. wintercounts.

Diaries. Monuments. Memory...

artist residency september - october 2020

exhibition 15 - 19 December 2020

Edy Fung

Memories from two pandemics are showcased simultaneously in this space. Selecting 14 entries of the artist’s own online diaries from the 2003 SARS pandemic in Hong Kong, Edy Fung carefully decoded this written record of memories into Chinese telegraph code and then morse code scripts during her residency at Art Arcadia. Each of them were burnt onto a full goat skin, displayed in timber skeletons of tombstones, translated from a section in St Augustine’s graveyard. She is interested in exploring how the methods of documentation and recording ranged and evolved in histories and cultures, from monumental engravings, winter counts to digital diaries, social media accounts and the Internet Archive.

Responding to this site-specific, sculptural representation, the artist has written a series of 14 new diaries, published online in Art Arcadia’s instagram page during 1st-14th October 2020, reflecting living and lived moments in parallel to this pandemic in 2020. The content of these 14 posts were converted into morse code, presented here as an immersive sonic form that is synthesised and shaped over the course of 2 hour and 9 minutes.

Working at the interface between the physical and the digital, Edy Fung seeks to understand how our material world is conditioned. These include exploring underlying systems, ecologies, ideologies and technological shifts that are dominating our everyday values. She works with images, videos, sound, text, installation and exhibition-making, treating them as ingredients and tools to test her inquiries and speculations about the present world phenomena. Her intermedia practice embarks as material experiments – abstracting, dissecting and sampling the essence of existing ideas to configure different possibilities. This year, the subjects around signs and representations are in the centre of her exploration. 

Edy Fung is a multidisciplinary artist, musician and curator currently based between Derry and Stockholm. She holds a BSc (Hons) at Welsh School of Architecture, MA Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University in partnership with the Design Museum, and completed an MA Architecture at the Royal College of Art with a distinction in her dissertation. Her approach from the expanded field of architecture has taken her to pursue directorship at Catalyst Arts Gallery 2017-19 and fellowship at CuratorLab at Konstfack 2020-21, crossing from design disciplines to the visual arts and intermedia. Additional information can be found on her website: https://edy-f.com

This project is in partnership with St Augustine’s Heritage Site and is kindly funded by Derry City & Strabane District Council, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and The Ireland Funds.

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