Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff: Winter Sublet

This fall, Spring Workshop will be taken over by Berlin-based American artist duo Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. For their six-week residency which they consider a “sublet” of Spring Workshop’s space and program, Henkel, Pitegoff and their invited collaborators will develop a script at Spring. They will stage a series of public and private events that will inform and shape the final script allowing the project’s language to grow with the community in and around Spring.

Christina Li, Director of Spring Workshop, says, “After four years of commissioning and presenting artists’ visionary projects and research in Hong Kong, and supporting the remarkable work of our international and local institutional partners, as we enter our final year, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s project is a timely reflection on Spring Workshop’s role as a breeding ground of ideas, its materialization as well as a site of collaboration. For this occasion, Henkel and Pitegoff’s script-in-progress brings these notions to their breaking point, cracking open a constructive moment for both Spring and its audience to imagine and reflect on our definitions and the conditions of production.”

Written collaboratively with other artists and writers, Henkel and Pitegoff’s script is a semi-fictionalized audit of the institutional mechanics of Spring Workshop. It will embrace the infinite alternatives within the site of expected production: the residency. As Spring Workshop prepares for its final year, marking it with a program devoted to music, Henkel and Pitegoff will impose a love story onto Spring’s imagined future and restaged past. Centered on the Spring Workshop terrace looking out onto the brand new MTR station and Aberdeen's churning real estate developments, the script follows lovers’ collapse into a trap of repetition following their patterns of production and narcissism. The space of the residency functions as an island where heartbreak is transformed into profit, and an obsession with material surroundings fuels a drama over emotional and intellectual property.

“This is a one-of-a-kind moment for Spring Workshop. We will hand the keys to the entire place over to Henkel and Pitegoff, and then wait with anticipation and glee to see what wild ideas unfold here,” says Spring Founder Mimi Brown.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff are artists-in-residence at Spring Workshop in July, November and December 2016. Their collaborators include among others Caroline Busta, Georgia Gray, Daniel Keller, Pablo Larios, Ari Benjamin Meyers and Jan Vorisek.