Akeroyd Collection

Recent acquisition: Miyu Hosoi Fixation 5, 2022 audio cables, 60-channel speakers, playback circuit board, fiberglass mesh, wire 40 x 200 x 5.5 cm #miyuhosoi #細井美裕 @miyuhosoi @gallery_38 #akeroydcollection #newacquisition Fixation 5 offers a quiet yet intricate exploration of sound, time and perception. Installed on the wall at a height associated with landscape painting, the work initially appears as a monochromatic black panel. On closer inspection, however, its surface reveals a complex arrangement of audio cables, attached to a 60-channel speaker system, with playback circuit boards on a surface of fibreglass and mesh panel. These components remain deliberately exposed, forming a relief across the dark ground. The cables trace delicate, organic patterns across the surface. Their forms resemble wood grain, root systems or dense foliage. The materials are entirely black against a black background, and so the image does not reveal itself immediately. Instead, texture and shadow gradually disclose the composition, inviting viewers to approach slowly and look more carefully. Sound is the essential component in the work. Hidden within the structure, the speakers emit a series of chords, broken down into fixed pitches at particular parts of the work. As the viewer walks past the piece, these pitches shift based on orientation to the viewers position, effectively giving the viewer agency in the ‘playing’ of the work. Hosoi describes sound as a ‘time-based medium,’ yet in Fixation 5 she seeks to loosen its dependence on linear progression. The circulating sound fragments create what she describes as a sense of ‘non-time,’ allowing moments to repeat, overlap and reproduce freely in relation to the position of each viewers body, rather than advancing toward a fixed conclusion on its own terms. (Continued in comments.) Photos 1 and 3: Tsutsumi Yano, courtesy of Gallery 38 Photo 2: So Mitsuya, courtesy of Gallery 38

Recent acquisition: AFSAR × DAVRA Proxy Conference: In Forest, 2023 single channel video with colour, stereo sound 35 minutes 4 seconds #afsar #davra @afsar_asianfeministstudio @davracollective #akeroydcollection #newacquisition Proxy Conference: In Forest (2023) by AFSAR and DAVRA unfolds at dusk within a wooded clearing, where a small gathering forms a temporary council beneath the trees. Participants sit together in a circle, drinking tea and burning incense as daylight fades into night. Wearing masks that blur individual identity, they take turns sharing stories from different localities. The gathering adopts the structure of a conference, yet its format diverges from conventional academic or political assemblies. Instead of papers or speeches, knowledge circulates through spoken narrative, attentive listening, and collective presence. (Continued in comments). Images 1-3: Film stills, AFSAR × DAVRA, Proxy Conference: In Forest, 2023 © AFSAR × DAVRA. Courtesy of the artists Image 4: Installation view of film and masks at the 9th Asia Art Biennial (2024), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts Taichung. © AFSAR × DAVRA. Courtesy of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts Taichung

Recent Acquisition: Miyu Hosoi Human Archive Center (Bataan Technology Park), 2025 stainless steel plate, 2-channel speaker, media player 49 x 20 x 17 cm #miyuhosoi #細井美裕 @miyuhosoi @gallery_38 #akeroydcollection #newacquisition Human Archive Center (2024-) is a series of works that examine the relationship between people, memory and the sites that hold traces of collective experience. Each iteration and installation consist of a stainless-steel plate mounted on the wall, accompanied by a two-channel speaker system. The works in this series has an intentionally uniform form; monochromatic, minimal and symbolically consistent, foregrounding sound as the primary medium. Collectively, the works consider forms of cultural gathering, from iconic artworks such as the Mona Lisa, to contested sites and objects such as Marco Polo’s House in Venice or the Rosetta Stone. The works consider how significance endures, not through aesthetic experience alone but through a type of shared social experience that articulates the extrinsic features of each site and moment, gathered in audio field recordings. This iteration draws on Miyu Hosoi’s visit to Bataan Technology Park in the Bataan, Philippines, formerly the Philippine Refugee Processing Center. Once a gathering site for Indochinese refugees from the former French colonies of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the area still contains handmade religious monuments created by refugees reflecting on their homelands. Although the site has since been renamed for economic development, it remains largely unmaintained. Paths are overgrown, facilities deteriorate, yet local residents continue to care for it by repainting signage and informally preserving its presence. (Continued in comments.) Photo: So Mitsuya, courtesy of Gallery 38

🚨 Update at 12PM HKT March 18: RSVP is now closed as we are at capacity! 🚨 Thanks for your support and interest. Artists Space, Stephen Cheng & Shane Akeroyd @akeroydcollection are pleased invite you to a special performance by Eiko Ishibashi + Jim O’Rourke! March 26, 9pm
Empty Gallery (18/F) The gallery will stay open until 11pm for this occasion. 
3 Yue Fung Street
18th & 19th Floor, Grand Marine Center
Tin Wan, Hong Kong

Eiko Ishibashi is a Japan-based musician whose work spans pop, experimental, and film music. She has released albums on labels such as Drag City, Black Truffle, and Editions Mego. In 2021, she gained international recognition for her score for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car. She released For McCoy on Black Truffle in 2022, the same year she joined NTS Radio as a resident. In 2023, she reunited with Hamaguchi to compose music for Evil Does Not Exist as well as the silent film GIFT, which they toured internationally with live performances. In March 2025, she released Antigone, her first vocal album in seven years, on Drag City. Jim O’Rourke, born in Chicago in 1969, has bridged experimental, contemporary, and popular music throughout his career. Alongside projects such as Gastr Del Sol and Loose Fur, he collaborated with Takehisa Kosugi as a composer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and performed with Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Christian Wolff. His solo works include the acclaimed Bad Timing (1997), continuing the tradition of contemporary Americana, and Eureka (1999), blending folk and minimal music. From 1999 to 2005, he was a member and music director of Sonic Youth, and in 2004 he won a Grammy Award for producing Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born. Now based in Japan, O’Rourke continues to be a prolific producer, working with artists such as Quruli, Kahimi Karie, Eiko Ishibashi, and Kenta Maeno. His wide-ranging output also includes contemporary classical releases (such as Toru Takemitsu’s Corona Tokyo Realization) and scores for films by Werner Herzog, Olivier Assayas, Shinji Aoyama, Koji Wakamatsu, and others. @eikoishibashi @artistsspace #JimORourke @shaneakeroyd

Recent acquisition: Martha Atienza Adlaw sa mga Mananagat (Fisherfolk Day), 2022 video, no sound 45 minutes 23 seconds #marthaatienza @martha.atienza #akeroydcollection #newacquisition Adlaw sa mga Mananagat (Fisherfolks Day) (2022) by Martha Atienza captures a community in a moment of collective presence, celebration, and reflection. Slowed to a meditative rhythm, the work follows a parade of brightly decorated fishing boats as they move across the waters of Bantayan group of Islands in the Visayan Sea, where Atienza lives and works. The silent, sow-motion film lends a solemn atmosphere, imbued with gravitas and pathos, transforming a local festivity into a poetic meditation on resilience, memory, and collective strength. (Continued in comments.) Images: Martha Atienza, Adlaw sa mga Mananagat (Fisherfolks Day), details from film stills, 2022 © Martha Atienza. Courtesy the Artist and Silverlens Gallery. @silverlensgallery

Tony Oursler db, 1997 video, sound, fabric dimensions variable @tonyoursler #tonyoursler #workfromtheakeroydcollection #akeroydcollection In 'db' (1997), Tony Oursler continues his exploration of the human condition and the complexities of human emotion by studying the many actual facial expressions of David Bowie. In this work, two miniature cloth figures are arranged in an impromptu and casual setting, arm in arm. They wear brightly patterned cloths, and their heads are formed from grey cloth, stuffed to form an appropriately bulbous surface onto which Bowie's face is projected in duplicate. This is a continuation of a familiar technique of Oursler’s but marks the first time David Bowie becomes a specific subject of the work. In 2013, however, Bowie commissioned Tony Oursler to direct his music video 'Where are we now?' which was recorded in secret at Oursler’s studio in New York City. It was released by ISO and Columbia Records via Bowie’s website without any announcement, as the lead single of his 24th studio album 'The Next Day' on iTunes on 8 January 2013, Bowie’s 66th birthday. The song received significant news coverage and was deemed a welcome return from Bowie’s decade-long hiatus. Images: Installation view, Tony Oursler, Black Box, 23 January – 16 May 2021, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. Image Courtesy of the artist, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. @lehmannmaupin ID in ALT text

Another video work by Arthur Jafa has entered the collection! Arthur Jafa Townshend, 2025 video 33 minutes 46 seconds #arthurjafa @anamibia #akeroydcollection #newacquisition In 'Townshend', Arthur Jafa transforms a still photograph of Pete Townshend, originally taken by celebrated music photographer Michael Putland, into a disquieting moving portrait. Using an AI programme to reanimate the static image, Jafa produces a face that blinks, twitches, and turns almost imperceptibly. The film oscillates between the mechanical and the human; Townshend’s eyes widen and drift, his mouth trembles as if about to speak, his expression slipping between melancholy, vacancy, and faint amusement. The soundtrack, at times swelling, at times vanishing into silence, shapes a hypnotic rhythm of presence and absence. As the camera inches closer, the viewer is caught in the uneasy intimacy of the stare, a meditation on performance, projection, and the unstable boundary between the living and the digital. Departing from his rapid-fire editing and archival montage, Jafa here manipulates what he calls ‘the space between the images. The flow.’ In 'Townshend', that flow becomes temporal and psychological. The tiny tremors of a face resurrected from stillness, a study of the medium’s power to animate and deceive. The song, Eminence Front from The Who’s 1982 album It’s Hard is significant as the fulcrum around which these uneasy inflections occur. Taking an uncharacteristically ‘funk’ approach, critics noted that this white band of rock royalty arrived at funk a little late. The song discusses the excesses of the wealthy and leans into the Miami Beach aesthetic where the band were spending time and where Townsend was using cocaine. (Continued in comments). Image 1: Arthur Jafa, Installation view, Arthur Jafa, GLAS NEGUS SUPREME, Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, 10 October - 20 December 2025. © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison Image 2-3: Arthur Jafa, Townshend (still), 2025, video, 33 min 46 sec. © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London @sadiecoleshq ID in ALT text

Recent acquisition: Arthur Jafa Structural Mutiny _ Prince, 2025 video 12 minutes 52 seconds #arthurjafa @anamibia #akeroydcollection #newacquisition 'Structural Mutiny _ Prince' unfolds from a single fragment of fan-shot performance footage of Prince stepping away from his keyboard to join the band in a brief, ecstatic sequence of dance. The clip is short, low resolution, and as familiar as anything that may be found online, yet the work recasts it as a study in rhythm, mediation, and the unstable architectures of looking. Prince, in a white suit, ruby cufflinks, and Cuban heels, glows under stage lights. He moves through a choreography that slips between precision and abandon. Knees slice the air, hips torque into the beat, a hand flicks with the delicacy of a musical grace note. What might first read as a charismatic performer holding a crowd quickly reveals itself as something else: a site where gesture carries its own complex grammar. As the loop repeats, perception begins to warp. Each cycle feels minutely altered. A shift in the camera angle, the crowd’s roar swelling at different moments at different volumes, a sudden cut that changes the angle of entry into the scene. We cannot tell if these differences are material or simply effects of our repeated attention. The fluctuating volume, the rough edits, the relentless repetition run counter to the smoothness of professional post-production. These frictions pull us toward the scaffold of the work itself. They unsettle the conventions of music video, documentary, and archival footage, as though the mutiny named in the title is occurring within the structure of the medium rather than within the performance it contains. (Continued in comments). Image 1: Arthur Jafa, Installation view, Arthur Jafa, GLAS NEGUS SUPREME, Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, 10 October - 20 December 2025. © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison Image 2: Arthur Jafa, Structural Mutiny _ Prince (still), 2025 © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. @sadiecoleshq

Lee Kit Blink and blank, 2020 Gesso on wood, looped digital video with sound. 23.5 x 29.0 x 1.0 cm 45 minutes 38 seconds #workfromtheakeroydcollection #leekit #akeroydcollection 'Blink and blank' is a film full of affective solemnity. An image, cropped to the extreme right side of the projection depicts a bare winter tree, a streetlamp and a grey sky. The high-contrast image, in blacks, whites and greys is in motion, rippling and blurred through the reflection of a body of water. The reflected image, now upside down, depicts an acute angle from the ground up, looking towards and through the bare branches. The looped visuals have an aural component of fragmented songs and daily noises, lending an idling poetics to the experience. The audio enhances a feeling of disengagement and alienation of the contemporary power of the image, and a particular exposition of a contemplative tone, that in context with other works and situations, renders a particular field of meaning and air of ephemerality. Image: Installation view, Lee Kit, Blink and blank, from The Gazing Eyes Won't Lie, 14 May - 4 July 2020, MASSIMODECARLO, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist and MASSIMDODECARLO. @massimodecarlogallery ID in ALT text

Friedrich Kunath Untitled, 2009 DVD Duration: 14 minutes 22 seconds #workfromtheakeroydcollection #FriedrichKunath #akeroydcollection @friedrichkunath In 'Untitled', we see a person in a snowman costume, replete with coal buttons, eyes, and a carrot nose, wearing a hat and scarf walking around a landscape. They are dressed as the quintessential, festive snowman except for carrying a large white suitcase. This person, however, sets a paradoxical tone in that they roam a baron, rocky, desert world – the last place on earth you might find a winter snowman. A lamenting piano tune accompanies the footage, and familiar cinematic techniques, shots and frames are sequenced together; the long shot that takes in the enormity of the landscape, the close crop, showing the snowman’s struggle over the terrain, and attendant panning shots that offer contextual atmospherics to the scene. The overall impression is that this snowman is out of time, out of place, and out of context to say the least. As the final shot zooms out to a great distance, we sense the enormity of their plight. There are no landmarks, no sensible horizon line, just infinite rock faces and dry arid land to contend with and overcome. The innate artificiality of the character means the snowman may not physically melt, but as we watch their experience of purgatory, we instead witness their hopes and will dissolve. Images: Friedrich Kunath, Untitled (still), 2009, video, 14 mins 22 secs. Courtesy of the artist and BQ Gallery. @bq_berlin ID in ALT text

Recent acquisition: Sanja Iveković Instructions No. 2, 2015 color, sound, video 4 minutes 52 seconds #SanjaIveković #akeroydcollection #newacquisition This work revisits and reinterprets the artists seminal 1976 video work, 'Instructions No. 1', nearly 40 years later. In both works, the artist faces the camera directly, methodically drawing black arrows across her face. We see lines and arrows drawn on her forehead, cheeks, and chin, enacting a gesture that evokes cosmetic diagrams, beauty tutorials, or surgical markings surgeons make prior to cutting, shaping and transforming the face. The act unfolds slowly and deliberately, transforming a seemingly banal ritual of self-care or preliminary act of surgery into a meditation on representation, control, and time. (Continued in comments). Images courtesy of the artist and P Two One Gallery @p21.kr ID in ALT text

Recent acquisition: Sanja Iveković Un jour violente, 1976 b&w, sound 20 minutes 38 seconds #SanjaIveković #akeroydcollection #newacquisition In 'Un jour violente' (1976) Sanja Iveković transforms the language of commercial advertising into a performance that exposes the social construction of femininity. The work takes its structure from a beauty feature published in Marie Claire, which instructed women on how to embody different moods through makeup, clothing, and attitude. The advert suggests: ‘One day, violent: today you are dazzling... you feel irresistible joy... you want sparkling drinks, intensive light, provoking dresses’. For the performance, Iveković recreated the advertisement’s design as a three-part installation titled Un jour tendre, Un jour violente, and Un jour secrète. She applied makeup, drank refreshments, and changed outfits while her recorded narration of the advert’s text played through loudspeakers. By literally enacting the instructions of a beauty campaign, Iveković revealed the tension between glamour and aggression embedded in the media’s portrayal of women. The work situates the female body as a contested site, one shaped by ideals of seduction, consumption, and control. Combining irony and critique, 'Un jour violente' reflects Iveković’s ongoing examination of how mass media scripts gendered behaviour, turning the language of self-expression into a subtle form of discipline. In this video component of the performance, the female body is presented as a social battleground, reified by the magazine and beauty industries, where here, specifically, Marie Claire magazine equates glamour and desire with violence. The seemingly edgy yet supposed benevolent PR is, on the contrary, revealed as an absurd contributing technology of the forced construction of women’s identities. Images courtesy of the artist and P Two One Gallery @p21.kr ID in ALT text