Transit In Doubt Photography Exhibition

September 3 – September 18 

Transit in Doubt is a multimedia photography exhibition featuring the works of ten female domestic helpers from Indonesia currently living in Hong Kong. 

There are currently 300,000 foreign domestic helpers who live and work in Hong Kong, most of them female. The helpers, mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia, earn only one-third of the average salary in Hong Kong (500USD) despite working over 80 hours a week. 

The cameras that they hold in their hands enable them to shift from being seen to seeing – a power transposition towards recovering their sense of selfhood and agency. Despite being domestic helpers, they should not be condemned to a life of servitude. Rather, their work involves a process of negotiation, transiting through contradicting emotions of frustration, hope and uncertainty. 

The artworks by ten domestic helpers reflect these fluctuating emotional states. They capture these revelatory moments of change and share their intimate stories of empowerment with us in this exhibition. 

These images were captured with the Holga, a medium format 120-film camera known for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga’s low-cost construction and simple meniscus lens often yields pictures that display vignettes, blur, light leaks, and other distortions. Similarly, the participating domestic helpers may be apprehended by different fates in Hong Kong.