An accompanying programme of Para Site’s 30th Year Anniversary exhibition, ‘Site-seeing’, Para Site and Eaton HK are pleased to present a screening programme that dialogues with the exhibition’s inquiries into spatial politics, construction of memory, and urban perception.
Screened in Hong Kong for the first time, film works by Haig Aivazian (b. 1980, Beirut), Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki (b. 1988, Rabat/b. 1985, Tel Aviv), Cheng Ran (b. 1981, Inner Mongolia), and Hu Wei (b. 1989, Dalian) will be on view. Opening with Bennani and Barki’s humorous short animation reflecting on friendship and community, before addressing the politics of urban space in Aivazian and Hu Wei’s works, the programme will end with Cheng Ran’s feature-length film CK2K2X (2017-2022), the product of a five-year artistic endeavour that offers a poetic take on present-day China and its different faces.
Date: Friday, 5 June 2026
Doors Open: 7pm
Venue: Kino Theatre, 1/F, Eaton HK, 380 Nathan Road, Jordan, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Programme (in order of screening):
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Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki
2 Lizards, Episode 1
2020
Video with color and sound
1 min 26 secs
Courtesy of the artists and Para Site
Part of a computer-animated, short-form web series created by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, the film depicts a surrealist view of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded in New York City. Two animated, anthropomorphised lizards serve as the protagonists, moving through a city gripped by a pandemic, extended isolation, and cries for social justice reform. It highlights the helplessness and uncertainty experienced by many at the time, as well as the unexpected moments of shared community and connection.
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HU Wei
Proposal for Public Assembly/Encounter
2019
B&W HD video with stereo sound
16 mins 1 sec
Courtesy of the artist and Para Site
Examining the relationship between image and memory in post-revolutionary China, Hu Wei researches the history of a revolutionary square in his hometown—which he names ‘City D’—as a site marked by its socialist heritage. Using a cinematic and semi-fictional approach, the film asks whether personal memory can function as a historical archive, how images and memory are shaped by power dynamics, and whether the public sphere can ever become depoliticised.
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Haig Aivazian
All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes
2021
Video with color and sound
17 mins 34 secs
Courtesy of the artist and Para Site
All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes tracks the public administration of light and darkness as an essential policing tool. Moving between cities like New York and London—with the artist’s native Beirut setting the central pulse—the video creates an associative genealogy that ranges from whale oil lamps to gas lanterns to LED bulbs, from blackouts to curfews. Comprising found footage and material from the artist’s own phone, and by layering, splicing, and confronting disparate kinds of sound and image, Aivazian generates a sensorial meditation on how the fundamentals of human vision—light hitting the retina—were mechanised into tools that capture our movements, be it in everyday life or on screen.
---------------15 mins interval--------------
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CHENG Ran
CK2K2X
2017-2022
Anamorphic widescreen, video with sound
65 mins
Commissioned by By Art Matters Museum
Courtesy of the artist and Para Sit
CK2K2X is Cheng Ran’s five-year artistic project under the thematic umbrella of CK2K2X, marking his first large-scale endeavor comprising one hundred video works ranging from fleeting seconds to tens of minutes blending documentary and fictional narratives. This body of work serves as a conceptual response to Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 documentary China. Through a hybrid form of documentary and pseudo documentary, the hundred videos and soundtracks challenge the boundaries of cinematic realism, weaving across time past, present, and future and intersecting themes of society, individual identity, modern cities, and wilderness. Personalised visual and auditory samples unfold at the intersections of nature and modernity, emotion and reality, truth and imagination.
The programme will be followed by a short Q&A with artist Cheng Ran, moderated by Yuanyu Li, Assistant Curator, Para Site.