Don't Shoot, Occupy HK 2014 series

2014 - Photography (Photography)
40.64 x 50.8 cm

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre. The protest was named after the hundreds of thousand umbrellas used by protestors to protect themselves from pepper spray, becoming an iconic image of the 2010s. From the various images of the protest, it is Bacani’s black and white photographs that best capture the tensions, antagonisms, and palpitating teen-led utopia that the Umbrella Movement became. Symbolically, the strength of the work also lies in Bacani’s gaze as a former domestic helper in Hong Kong, thus presenting a certain incompleteness of democracy in a society that is structurally xenophobic and racist. Bacani’s perspective is not only focused on and about fellow domestic workers, but also channels the voice of her generation of Hong Kongers, an identity that is not always afforded to Filipino workers in the city. This series of photographs form part of the artist’s broader interest in mass behaviour which she further developed in the Philippines while shooting massively attended religious processions.

Xyza Cruz Bacani is a Filipina author and photographer who uses documentary-style photography to call attention to less visible, erased, and under-reported global events. Having worked as a second-generation domestic worker in Hong Kong for almost a decade, she has devoted an important part of her work in photography to subjects related to migrant labor in global capitalism. Bacani has also worked on a commission in the Philippines to capture the aftermath of contexts in crisis, including the siege of Marawi; a large town in the south of the country that was heavily bombarded by Duterte’s war on the ‘radicalization’ of Islam in the Mindanao region. Bacani has become an icon in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, operating beyond the fields of art and photography, as she is involved in social justice projects. Amongst her many accolades, the Philippines House of Representatives named the resolution HR No.1969, in her honor.

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