The supercut to end all supercuts, James T. Hong’s seven-plus hour ongoing project Apologies (2012– ) is a chronological compilation of 161 instances in which world leaders have said they are deeply sorry, expressed their profound regrets, and on behalf of their governments repented for past deeds, decades of discrimination, and generational crimes. The spectacle is as tedious as it is revolting and enraging. 

Shown in a three-channel format at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, the sequence begins in 1970 with footage of German chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees in front the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument and ends in 2022 with the Netherlands’ prime minister Mark Rutte apologizing for the country’s role in slavery. In between we see US president Ronald Reagan’s gesture to “right a grave wrong” against Japanese Americans interned during World War II; the Pope begging for forgiveness for the Church’s crimes against native peoples in the Americas; and South Korean president Park Geun-hye bowing, twice, in tearful admissions of the failed response to the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster. 

The perfunctory, insincere, hypocritical, and self-serving tenor of these gestures makes you question their ultimate purpose, often so long (years, decades, centuries, even) after the fact. The insufferably proud Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who dominates long stretches of the mid-2010s, appears to relish the opportunities to apologize so deeply and so profoundly for his country’s wrongs that his own performances seem to fill him with jouissance. Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison meanwhile attempts to atone for institutional child sexual abuse in a routine which falls horrifyingly flat. In all its deadening effects, Hong’s mashup sparks a deeper rage, one that gradually ignites on the dry, combustible kindling of our latent cynicism.