M+ Facade: Pipilotti Rist and M+ Cinema spring edition

Pipilotti Rist: Hand Me Your Trust  
M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District is delighted to announce a brand-new work by Swiss video art pioneer Pipilotti Rist. The work, titled Hand Me Your Trust, will be shown on the M+ Facade from March 18 to June 17, 2023 from 7–9pm daily.

Commissioned by M+ and supported by Art Basel and UBS, Hand Me Your Trust is a moving image work created specifically for the M+ Facade, a massive screen set within the undulating architecture of Hong Kong’s world-famous skyline along the Victoria Harbour. Presented in the hustle and bustle of a city with millions of inhabitants, Hand Me Your Trust incorporates Rist’s typically vivid colour palettes and freeform camera work, echoing the dynamic shifts in scale of Hong Kong’s urban landscape. 

Rist approaches the concept of the hand from a variety of angles, incorporating gestures and movements that are recognizable but also mysterious. As the hands weave and twist in space, Rist references different scales ranging from the personal and intimate to something the size of a building. Hand Me Your Trust is an energetic celebration of human connectedness made in recognition of the many people who played a part in building the city and our world with their hands. It emerges as a cordial gesture to audiences in Hong Kong—an invitation to embrace and appreciate each unexpected encounter, every minute interaction and the small achievements in our everyday lives. The collective contributions of our personal touch can together build cities, communities, and vibrant histories. 

M+ Cinema
Since its opening in June 2022, M+ Cinema has forged its identity as a dynamic platform for conversations on films from across genres, generations, and geography. The Spring 2023 Edition from April to June features 28 programmes with works by acclaimed Asian and international film directors and artists. In addition, M+ Cinema co-presents two screening events with the Hong Kong International Film Festival: Laura Poitras’s award-winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), a portrait of the renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin; and Master Class with Tsai Ming-Liang and actor Lee Kang-Sheng that also presents the paintings Tsai created on screen through his new work Where Do You Stand, Tsai Ming-Liang?.

M+ Cinema’s thematic programme “From Surge to Burst: Japan’s Frenetic Years”—in dialogue with the museum’s opening exhibition Things, Spaces, Interactions —revisits the electrifying Japan of the 1980s to the early 2000s and explores its anxieties within a near-burst bubble economy. Programme highlights include Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) by Paul Schrader; Denchu-Kozo and Electric Dragon (1987 and 2001, respectively) by Shinya Tsukamoto and Sogo Ishii; and Tokyo-Ga (1985) by Wim Wenders.

“Thinking Global, Acting Local: Ecology on Film” critically examines global manufacturing and consumption, land reclamation and farming, and world experiences from a non-human perspective. Selections in this thematic programme include China Blue (2005) by Micha X. Peled; Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier; Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel; and Untitled (Human Mask) (2014) by Pierre Huyghe.

The recurrent artist film series “Afterimage” will present Japanese artist Daïchi Saïto’s experimental cinema in an all 35mm presentation and the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s feature debut Last and First Man (2020) narrated by Tilda Swinton. In addition, “Screen Encounters” invites Hong Kong-born artist Wong Ping known for his idiosyncratic animations, to share a selection of moving image works that form a dialogue with his creative process.