Exhibition dates: 3rd September – 18th September
Private View: 3rd September (Thursday), 6pm-9:30pm
Lensational presents their first UK exhibition titled Transit in Doubt, featuring the work of 10 foreign domestic workers who live and work in Hong Kong, at Art Represent in London.
Transit in Doubt is a photographic exhibition documenting the personal journeys of domestic workers as they navigate their way through their new environment. Providing female domestic workers in Hong Kong with the skills and equipment, Lensational empowers them through photography.
The artworks in the exhibition reflect a variety of emotions and capture revelatory moments of change as the photographers share intimate visual stories with viewers, allowing visitors to the exhibition to become a part of their experience and empowerment.
There are currently 300,000 foreign domestic helpers who live and work in Hong Kong, most of them female. The helpers, mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia, earn only one-third of the average salary in Hong Kong (500USD) despite working over 80 hours a week.
The images featured in the exhibition have been captured with the Holga, a medium format 120-film camera known for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga’s low-cost construction and simple meniscus lens often yields pictures that display vignettes, blur, light leaks, and other distortions. Similarly, the participating domestic helpers may be apprehended by different fates in Hong Kong. One may be lucky enough to have a good employer. Others may have been cheated, or unable to cope with the alienation of a new environment. It is impossible to predict the outcome of the photographs produced by a Holga camera – the developed film may sometimes be obscured, sometimes crystal clear. The end result is always unknown.