Performance: Ho Rui An, DASH
September 25, 2022
Silver Street Studios, East Gallery
2000 Edwards St., Houston, TX 77007
Opening with footage of an accident captured from a dashcam, DASH considers the convergence between crisis and accident within a risk-managed and financially hedged era. While the dashcam was designed to bear witness to the accidents that happen to the vehicle it was fitted for, its proliferation in recent years has inadvertently yielded a contemporary index of the accident in the vast accumulation of crash footage on the Internet. By probing what it means to move on from the accident, as do the many vehicles in these images, the lecture unravels the broader logic of “horizon scanning” that underpins the foresight programmes of the Singapore government. As a crucial node along the electronic circuits of global finance as well as the sweaty regional routes crossed by disenfranchised migrant labour, Singapore is held up within the lecture as a privileged site to attend to the disturbances or “weak signals” that crop up on the horizon. From this limit-space where one can never know what might come at you, a fantastic speculative economy—populated by the likes of “black swans” and “dragon kings”—is produced to affirm some narratives while foreclosing others.
About Ho Rui An
Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance, and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay, and film, he probes into the ways images are produced, circulate, and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale (2020), Asian Art Biennial (Taichung, 2019), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, 2018), Gwangju Biennale (2018), Jakarta Biennale (2017), Sharjah Biennial (2016), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2017), Kunsthalle Wien (2021), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2017), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017), and Para Site (Hong Kong, 2015). In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
FotoFest Biennial 2022 Media Sponsor:
Image: Ho Rui An, DASH, 2016–18. Performance, installation. Performance documentation at the FotoFest Biennial 2022 If I Had a Hammer, Houston, Texas, 2022. Courtesy of FotoFest. Photo: Tere Garcia.
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