Stolon Press (Simryn Gill and Tom Melick)
October 25, 5:30-8:00pm | Asia Now 2025, La Monnaie de Paris
Stolon Press, Hustle Culture (video and publication), 2024
Single-channel video, 1:00:36
Commissioned by Lahore Biennale Foundation
Made possible with the support of Creative Australia
Complementing Lahore Biennale Foundation’s presentation of artworks in the Monnaie de Paris, Asia Now also presents a video program from Of Mountains and Seas, the 2024 edition, featuring video commissioned by the Lahore Biennale Foundation from Bani Abidi, Stolon Press (Simryn Gill and Tom Melick), Niamat Nigar, Fazal Rizvi, and Zheng Bo, as well as works by Gidree Bawlee. The program, like the works on view throughout the Monnaie de Paris, offer a vision of ecological awareness from Asian perspectives. Powered by the French Embassy to Pakistan.
Stolon Press’s Hustle Culture is a record made of the daily life around three bird baths placed under a chaste tree and a tamarind tree, in a small garden, in a small town in Malaysia. The visitors to the baths vary—sunbirds, fantails, swallows, an occasional tailorbird, maybe even a kingfisher or oriole, a toad, as well the neighborhood’s fat cat. The baths are washed and refilled regularly; sometimes there are no visitors at all, save for a floating feather; the camera is too slow or too fast, too impatient, or badly positioned. Instead of a story or plot, there is rhythm, fluttering, and a daily patterning. The video is accompanied by an eponymous publication produced with typists in Lahore.