Sarah Morris: ETC

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, and Tai Kwun Contemporary are pleased to present ETC (2023), a feature-length film by American artist Sarah Morris (b. 1967). Commissioned by M+ and Tai Kwun, ETC will be exhibited on the M+ Facade every night from Friday, January 26 to Sunday, March 17, 2024.

ETC is a cinematic portrait of Hong Kong made in the spring of 2023, presenting the city in a moment of transformation. The film documents the psychology, architecture, economies and culture of Hong Kong, layering daily life with complex histories. The film spotlights both iconic and lesser-known locations across the city including the HSBC headquarters, Legislative Council Complex, ATL Logistics Centre, Sham Shui Po’s Electronic Market, Hop Cheong Pens & Lighters Co., and Hong Kong West Kowloon Station of the High Speed Rail. Graphic designer Henry Steiner, architect James H. Kinoshita, and actress Josie Ho are featured, along with many other Hong Kong residents.

ETC continues Morris’ examination of the chain of global sites in the electronic and digital age. Since her 1998 debut film Midtown, which captures a day in the life of New York, she has made sixteen films to date. Morris’s global cinematic production has featured locations including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro among countless others.

The title ETC playfully recalls the Electronic Teller Card, one of the first digital banking devices to be used around the world. Inspired by Henry Steiner’s early design for HSBC’s Electronic Teller Card held in the M+ Collections, ETC alludes to the history of Hong Kong as a global banking centre, while forming a futurist abbreviation for Morris’ latest film.

For the latest information on the programme, please visit here.

About Sarah Morris
Since the mid-1990s, New York–based artist Sarah Morris (b. 1967) has been making abstract paintings and films which form ‘urban, social, and bureaucratic typologies’. Her work is often derived from close inspection of architectural details combined with a critical sensitivity to psycho-geography. She has exhibited extensively, including recent solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany (2023); Espace Louis Vuitton Munich (2023); Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2023); Jesus College, Cambridge (2019); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018); and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2017). 

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.