Collection
Postcritical Spirituality: Pecha Kucha + Community Mixer
Pecha Kucha Micro-Presentations
Since May, Per°Form CoThink Lab Fellow Opens has invited artists, academics, and activists invested in spiritual knowledges and practices to participate in Critical Spirituality, a programme series examining the place(s) of the spiritual in the contemporary world.
Opens was happy to gather some of its collaborators together once again for Postcritical Spirituality, an evening of Pecha Kucha micro-presentations followed by a free-and-easy community mixer.
Pecha Kucha Micro-Presentations
My Journey into Buddhism as a Non-binary Girl
Micro-Presentation by An Ding
This micro-presentation was an intimate, heartfelt sharing of An Ding’s unusual, winding journey into Buddhism by way of Christian Evangelicalism, atheism, and interfaith exploration. Through a mix of anecdotes drawn from her spiritual journey and personal meditations on Buddhist scriptures and practices, she offered an inspiring tale about finding queer affirmation through spiritual practice, and a glimpse into the work that could be (and is being) done to transform traditionally conservative communities and environments.
Threshold, Frontline, Frontier: Biodynamics in Struggle & The Power of Witness
Micro-Presentation by Meli Chan Lee
How can body-centered healing practices attuned to our original embodied being-states also nourish political action and enable collective repair? Through personal anecdotes gathered from her experiences in activism, performance, and therapeutic practice, Meli Chan Lee’s micro-presentation encouraged us to tap into our bodies’ potentials to better awaken and amplify consciousness, offering strategies for expanding our thresholds to receive the vibrant life-forces within and around us.
Cow, Union Buster!
Micro-Presentation by Parashar Kulkarni
Did the spread of the cow protection movement in colonial and postcolonial India encourage identitarianism and erode working class solidarity? Reviewing the situation in and around industrial cotton mills from the onset of the industrial revolution in India to the 1990s, Parashar Kulkarni’s micro-presentation discussed how the cow, a sacred symbol in Hinduism, was appropriated and weaponised in the anti-labour strategies of mill owners, political leaders, and pro-capitalist governments, becoming symbolic of new collusions between religion, politics and capital.
A Study of Redness: the Scarlet Woman & the Red Man
Micro-Presentation by Jireh Koh
In this micro-presentation, Jireh Koh discussed findings from his interdisciplinary research on mythology, theology, and meaning-making practices, focusing on a pair of enigmatic red-hued figures: the Scarlet Woman and the Red Man. Tracing the controversial, ambivalent roles played by these recurring figures across different religious/spiritual traditions, from Christianity and modern western esotericism to Hinduism and (Greco-)Buddhist thought, Jireh took the motif of redness as an entry point towards reflecting on a range of pressing themes, including gender roles, the abject, and the use of subversion and transgression as means for reclaiming power and agency.
Convergent Shamanism Through A Diasporic Lens
Micro-Presentation by Arunditha Emmanuel
Shamanism is arguably the most ancient and universal form of human spirituality, with multiple shamanisms arising around the world and throughout (pre)history in a kind of convergent evolution. Drawing on ethnographic materials and personal insights and experiences, Arunditha Emmanuel’s micro-presentation discussed some of the techniques and principles that guide her own neo-shamanic practice, offering a glimpse into the cosmological schema of one shamanic being.
Spectro-Commodities: A Very Brief Introduction
Micro-Presentation by Joshua Comaroff
It might seem curious that ghosts and spirits in Singapore are widely believed to be covetous, up-to-date consumers. Whereas “spectral theory” in the West often associates the ghost with the immaterial, the historical, and with lack, a rich and wildly diverse economy of offerings and other goods, including effigies modeled after luxury cars, designer clothes, gourmet foods, and the latest tech (not to mention absurdly exorbitant sums of hell money), has evolved to cater to the needs of the non-living here. In this micro-presentation, Joshua Comaroff shared some of his research into past and present conventions for ancestral gift-giving, and explored the questions that emerge around this medium of popular religious aesthetics.
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An Ding is a reader, writer and educator broadly interested in the theology, practices, and material cultures of all world religions. Her latest book, "Phoenix Rising: A Memoir about being Bipolar, Gay and Christian," chronicled her experiences undergoing conversion therapy, navigating the mental healthcare landscape in Singapore, and negotiating her various intersectional identities. She volunteers with Rainbodhi Singapore, a spiritual friendship group for LGBTQIA+ Buddhists, and is currently working on a book about sex, queerness & Buddhism with Kyle Neo, founder of Rainbodhi Singapore.
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Meli Chan Lee is a craniosacral therapist working between clinical and psychospiritual modalities with a background in dance improvisation/performance, critical studies and community organizing. An anthropologist and activist by training, she has most recently been working with collaborative transnational teams on generating new models for ritual, healing, and breath- and body-work for civic society frontliners in East and Southeast Asia. A child of Asia and the US, her BA in Anthropology, Theatre, and Peace & Conflict Studies is from Swarthmore College, PA.
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Parashar Kulkarni is an author, documentary filmmaker and an assistant professor working at the intersections of religion, history and material culture at Yale-NUS. He has published in literary and academic journals such as Granta, The Sociological Review, Boston Review, Social Science History, and the British Journal of Political Science. His writing has received several prizes including the British Academy’s Brian Barry Prize, Boston Review Aura Estrada Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. His first novel, Cow and Company, published by Penguin Random House Viking, is about the interactions of religion and capitalism under colonialism.
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Jireh Koh is a multidisciplinary artist and arts educator whose eclectic practice spans visual art, sound, movement and performance. His recent work draws especially on his research into comparative theology, mythology, and world esoteric practices, as well as his background as a Hindu-Buddhist Tantric practitioner. Jireh has exhibited on many occasions locally and abroad, including, most recently, at the group show Leave Nothing But Footprints co-organised by The Artist Village and L’Observatoire at Starch. He is also a classically trained vocalist who performs with VocaSong Ensemble.
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Deborah Arunditha Emmanuel is a performance artist and writer working between poetry, sound, movement, and the dramatic arts. She has performed at many events and festivals locally and worldwide, winning poetry slams in Singapore, New Zealand, Germany and Australia. She has been resident writer/artist at the Watermill Center in New York, Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, and The Marpha Foundation in Mustang. She makes neo-shamanic tribal funk music with Mantravine and co-organises Opens, a para-academic forum based in Singapore.
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Joshua Comaroff is a geographer and assistant professor of urban studies at Yale-NUS College and a designer at Lekker Architects. He studied literature and creative writing at Amherst College before joining the Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture programmes at Harvard. In 2009, he completed a PhD in cultural geography at UCLA, writing on the subject of haunted landscapes and urban memory in Singapore. In recent years, he has written about architecture, urbanism, and politics with an Asian focus, and is the co-author (with Ong Ker-Shing) of Horror In Architecture (2013).
Lethal Fantasies: Chrysalis
Rave
Join Per°Form CoThink Lab Fellow Bussy Temple at Lethal Fantasies, their recurring party series to platform femme and nonbinary DJs and artists within Southeast Asia’s vibrant contemporary electronic dance music scene.
In Lethal Fantasies: Chrysalis, aspects of femininity beyond power and seduction will be explored. Into the gory, undesirable, and eerie, through soundscapes from Teya Logos, Puppy Ri0t, rempit G0ddE$$, Suhsi, Metamoksha, nydthakid and performances by XUE, Sonia, and Divya.
Head to @bussytemple to find out more. Graphic design credits: JJ Low @arcaneomorph.
Video documentation of Lethal Fantasies: Chrysalis. Video by 8t6. (Contains flashing lights and may not be suitable for photosensitive epilepsy.)
Critical Spirituality Series - Ecstatic Initiations: Sound Through Shamanism
Workshop-Presentation with Performance-Demonstration
Sound is an essential element of the shamanisms practiced in indigenous cultures around the world, and continues to be an indispensable tool for neo-shamanic practitioners today. For the shaman, sonic techniques and technologies can open a multitude of dimensions within the self and the other, helping practitioners access altered states of consciousness, facilitate methods of healing and divination, and enable translocal and interspecies forms of communication.
In this workshop-presentation, Arunditha Emmanuel discussed the role of sound in shamanism and its possible intersections with contemporary music-making and creative processes. The evening concluded with an intuitive sound performance-demonstration by Arunditha and collaborating artist-musician Anise.
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Deborah Arunditha Emmanuel is a performance artist and writer working between poetry, sound, movement, and the dramatic arts. She has performed at many events and festivals locally and worldwide, winning poetry slams in Singapore, New Zealand, Germany and Australia. She has been resident writer/artist at the Watermill Center in New York, Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, and The Marpha Foundation in Mustang. She makes neo-shamanic tribal funk music with Mantravine and co-organises Opens, a para-academic forum based in Singapore.
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Anise (Suhui Hee) is a multidisciplinary artist and electronic musician working with sound, performance and experimental scoring. Her research interests delve into inhumanisms and the body as ecosphere.
Father’s Womb
Rave
T:>Works’ Per°Form CoThink Lab Fellow, Bussy Temple, presents Father’s Womb, a rave with an all queer and gender non-conforming lineup, wishing to celebrate those who do not find themselves settled on a single identity this pride season.
Rave spaces often lack the opportunity for gathering and encounter before the music begins. Prior to the party, Father’s Womb invites the queer ravers to The Sanctuary, an immersive space of togetherness to rest, share, and explore queer kinship and rave intimacies. It will provide mirrors, dressing/powdering area, minimal makeup tools, cushions to rest on, with private toilets available as well.
The ravers are encouraged to bring along any personal items they are ready to let go of or would like to contribute to The Sanctuary — paintings, writings, letters, photographs, objects. These items will make up the many small shrines around the space.
Collectively energising and bonding, The Sanctuary is a space where trust and care for one another feels firm and unshaken, where queer rituals manifest before the rave in ways that feel safer and comfortable, without judgement.
Video documentation of Father’s Womb. Video by 8t6. (Contains flashing lights and may not be suitable for photosensitive epilepsy.)
A Land Imagined: A Transnational Framework on Land Reclamation and Labour
Digital Keynote by Dr Jerrine Tan
Hosted and Moderated by Dr. Ong Keng Sen
Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT/HKT) / 8am (EDT) / 2pm (CEST)
Yeo Siew Hua’s “A Land Imagined” is interspersed with long scenes at a work site. The camera often rests on the droning work of machines and workers carting and sorting gravel. But for all the movement that is displayed, no change has taken place. Piles of gravel are demolished and moved to make new piles. The persons in the film appear similarly fungible: an injured labourer can become a driver, a corpse may or may not explain a disappearance. Ultimately, the site is revealed to be a land reclamation site which reveals that movement of gravel is not a closed innocuous system, but is part of a zero-sum game, in which one country grows bigger by cannibalising those around it. Using Saidiya Hartman’s work on fungibility as a lens through which Dr Jerrine Tan considers the modern-day “coolie” in the film, and Lisa Lowe’s writing on immigration and citizenship, her Per°Form keynote allegorises the movement of and across bodies of water for the similar movement of indentured labourers.
Media Release: Per°Form presents Digital Keynote by Dr Jerrine Tan — A Land Imagined: A Transnational Framework on Land Reclamation and Labour
Dr Jerrine Tan Ee-Wen (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English and currently teaches in Hong Kong. She received her PhD from Brown University and was previously a Visiting Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literature at Mount Holyoke College. Her research interests include World Literature, Transnational Literature, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Film. Her scholarly and public writing have been published or are forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies, Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro, Lit Hub, WIRED, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Brooklyn Rail, and Post45.
A World of Lines: From Third World Solidarities to Postsocialist Globalism
Installation view of “The Economy Enters the People” (2021–22), Ho Rui An, Lecture and video installation with digital prints on paper, conference table, office chairs, desk, stool, book trolley, books, thermos flasks, cups, saucers and acrylic name plate holders. Photo: Ketsiree Wongwan. Courtesy of Bangkok CityCity Gallery.
One-Day Discursive Programme
Curated by Ho Rui An
In 1971, a big-character poster put up by a frustrated worker at a factory manufacturing computers in Maoist-era China read: “The management follows the line of experts instead of the mass line; to build a computer one must know not only how to connect the lines but also where to draw the line!” About a year later, S. Rajaratnam, the Singapore foreign minister, vividly invoked in a now-historic speech the “tentacles of technology” that connected a global “chain of cities” which included the then rapidly developing city-state. Reading these two moments against the contemporary context of a globally integrated Chinese economy, the observation by the Singaporean statesman appears to have anticipated the displacement of Cold War-era ideological lines by the network of “lines” that would enable China to “open up” its economy to global capitalist markets during its Reform era.
Organised by artist, writer and Per°Form Fellow Ho Rui An, A World of Lines: From Third World Solidarities to Postsocialist Globalism explores the shifting geopolitical imaginaries within what was known as the Third World during the historical period that began with the end of empire and culminated in the late seventies with the foreclosure of socialism as a mass political project. In pursuing this periodisation, this one-day discursive programme seeks to map a historical trajectory distinct from Eurocentric narratives that situate the neoliberal triumph over international socialism in the late eighties. Contesting the enduring image of the fall of the Berlin wall as a liberation of the people into the free and unbounded space of the market, it considers instead what new lines are drawn to secure the market and how the persistence of socialist legacies amidst postsocialist globalism complicates the penetration of global capital into national markets across the world.
Through a series of presentations, workshops and focused conversations, invited speakers will share their research in response to these themes while facilitating a collective process of thinking with the various visual and literary sources that they have gathered from both public archives and private collections. This source-based and open-ended format reflects the ongoing and speculative nature of the inquiry amidst the intensification of unresolved Cold War-era tensions, resurgent ethnonationalisms and widening socioeconomic inequalities that have come to disrupt the lines of labour, technology and capital in the prevailing global order.
Presentations & Workshops
Factories, Tables, Revolution, Economy
Workshop with Ho Rui An and Zian Chen
Drawing upon their research into the political economy of Reform-era China, Ho Rui An and Zian Chen will share a selection of historical material sourced from official archives, informal networks and popular culture with which they seek to map the emergence of “the economy” as a distinct subject of governance in China beginning in the 1970s. Moving from cinematic scenes of factory workers pressuring their managers to adhere to the principles of socialist management to photographs of Chinese and Singaporean technocrats seated at massive meeting tables discussing techniques for managing society, this workshop invites participants to think through the set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the political from the economic—that underwrote the displacement of the revolutionary mass line by the lines of labour, technology and capital that connect everything within the global economy. Such a process preceded the official launch of China’s economic reforms by several years and was best observable at such liminal sites as the Canton Fair (China Import and Export Fair) where the capitalist and socialist worlds converged in a time when the ideological lines of the Cold War were being redrawn.
To A Faraway Friend: Letters Written with Fire
Workshop with Kathleen Ditzig, Sooyoung Leam and Carlos Quijon, Jr.
Based on research that has grown out of their Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities exhibitionary project, participants will explore the complex negotiation of neocolonial struggles for sovereignty under strongmen-led “democracies” across East and Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Participants will be encouraged to study historical material that illustrate demonstrations and uprisings in the region. They will also be asked to consider how neocolonial entanglements have mediated discourses of sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and self-interest. Participants will be invited to write fictional letters to a faraway friend to reconstruct their own “history” of these events. By leaning into the historical and the fictive as productive political gestures and questioning the responsibilities of marshalling these gestures, participants will not only reflect upon lesser known aspects of the evolving relationship that exists between postcolonial countries and world powers, but also consider how contemporary geopolitics and ideologies have coloured and framed the lens with which we can read histories of postcolonial solidarities and the futures that they set aflame.
Shekou, Jurong: Industrial Zone, Developmental State and Global Neoliberalism
Presentation by Taomo Zhou
Located on the western coast of Shenzhen, China’s first and most successful special economic zone, Shekou is an enclave just a little more than 2-square-kilometres that is even more experimental than Shenzhen itself. Established in January 1979, more than one year before the official launch of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, Shekou was the first “test tube” in socialist China that accepted foreign investment. Shekou’s design and development was partially inspired by Jurong, a district located in the western part of Singapore which transformed from a swamp land to an industrial hub in the 1970s. In this presentation, Taomo Zhou, who grew up in Shekou and has spent the past seven years living and working in Jurong, will share her memories and observations about the two industrial zones. Through this process, she seeks to explore larger questions about the international history of industrialisation and deindustrialisation and the global emergence of neoliberalism.
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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 by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Kunsthalle Wien; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; and Para Site, Hong Kong. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
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Zian Chen periodically collaborates with artists and writers to develop alternative frameworks for thinking and speculation. He is one of the founding members of Pailang Museum of Settler Selves (2022–), an editor-in-residence for Compost in ICA NYU Shanghai (2021–2022), as well as one of the editors for Made in Public (2022) and Arrow Factory: The Last Five Years (2020). He has also curated Production Fever 2008: Study Materials in Nida Art Colony, Nida (2022). In 2020–21, he was one of the founding editors for Heichi Magazine, an online journal for contemporary art published weekly in Chinese and English.
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Kathleen Ditzig is a Singaporean researcher and curator. She is currently a curator at National Gallery Singapore and a PhD candidate at the NTU School of Art, Design and Media. Her research interests include exhibitionary histories of Southeast Asia, global histories of capitalism and the enduring legacies of the Cold War. Her curatorial practice aspires to the iterative and meaningful building of networks and platforms. It has involved the development of artist residencies, publications and exhibitions for museums and government agencies. She co-founded offshoreart.co (with Robin Lynch and Debbie Ding), which looks at financial flows and extrastatecraft through the artworld, and Afro-Southeast Asia Affinities (with Carlos Quijon Jr.), which has been supported by KONNECT ASEAN and part of the digital platform South-South. Other than her iterative projects, her recent exhibitions include Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism Between Space and Home, co-curated with Fang Tze Hsu at Taipei Fine Art Museum (2022), and As The West Slept, Performa Consortium Project, Silver Art Projects New York (2019). Her research and writing has been published by MoMA Post, Southeast of Now (NUS Press), Afterall, Artforum, OSMOS magazine, Art Agenda, Art Review Asia, among others.
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Carlos Quijon, Jr. is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Manila. He was a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), convened by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories project. He writes exhibition reviews for Artforum (NY) and CNN Philippines. His essays are part of the books SEA: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia (Berlin: Weiss Publications, 2022), Writing Presently (Manila: Philippine Contemporary Art Network, 2019), and From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making: China and Southeast Asia (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019). Some of his essays have been published or are forthcoming in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art, Frieze (UK), Afro-Asian Visions, MoMA’s post (US), Queer Southeast Asia (Singapore), Financial Times Weekend (UK), ArtReview Asia (Singapore), Art Monthly (UK), Asia Art Archive’s Ideas (HK), and Trans Asia Photography Review (US), among others. He curated Courses of Action in Hong Kong (Para Site and Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, 2019); co-curated Minor Infelicities (Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2020); In Our Best Interests (NTU ADM Gallery, Singapore, 2021); Cast But One Shadow (UP Vargas Museum, Manila, 2021-2022); A Global South Cosmology of Capitalism (El Espacio 23, Miami, 2022); Synthetic Condition (UP Vargas Museum, Manila, 2022); and To A Faraway Friend (ASEAN Cultural House, Busan, 2022).
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Sooyoung Leam is a curator and art historian working between Seoul and London. Her ongoing research on archives explores intersections between sculpture, performance and politics. She studied History of Art at Cambridge University and completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her recent curatorial projects include Art Reimagined, organised by Meta (Seoul, 2022); Actually, the Dead are not Dead (Seoul, 2021); Gwangju Biennale special exhibition Between the Seen and the Spoken (Gwangju, 2021). She is currently Assistant Curator of the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023).
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Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Taomo received her PhD from Cornell University. Her first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Taomo is currently working on her second book project tentatively entitled Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China’s First Special Economic Zone, which is under contract with Stanford University Press.
Image, Data, Actor: Unpacking Images of Muslim Women
Digital Lecture by Nurul Huda Rashid
Hosted by Dr. Ong Keng Sen
Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT) / 2pm (CEST) / 8am (EDT)
T:>Works’ Per°Form continues with its third Fellow, researcher-writer Nurul Huda Rashid, currently pursuing her PhD in Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on images and narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them. Her digital lecture, Image, Data, Actor: Unpacking Images of Muslim Women will be moderated by T:>Works’ Artistic Director Dr. Ong Keng Sen.
The Muslim woman has been a consistent subject of representation across regimes of historical colonialism and Orientalism, in events such as the Arab Spring and post-9/11, and mediated widely via news and social media. These have included variegated representations from the odalisque to the ‘oppressed’ which have converged the identity of the Muslim woman to the single image and symbol of the hijab (veil). Spanning across different bodies of work, this lecture will introduce and plot Nurul’s photographic, annotative, and participatory research that has engaged with representations of Muslim women from the daguerreotype to data. These projects will be discussed alongside the medium of photography and the data shift, which transforms the self into data, rendering those in the margins as ‘absent data’. Through self-reflexive means and methods, the context of ‘absent data’ will become the site for artistic explorations and aspire towards a recalibration of Muslim women identities via the role of the Muslim woman as ‘actor’ in rethinking processes of image-making.
Media Release: Per°Form presents Digital Lecture by Nurul Huda Rashid — Image, Data, Actor: Unpacking Images of Muslim Women
Nurul Huda Rashid (she/her) is a researcher-writer currently pursuing her PhD in Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on images and narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them. These have been articulated through projects such as Women in War (2016-ongoing), unknown woman/wanita kami (2021), Hijab/Her (2012-2014), and through collaborations such as Pulau Something (2021) and New Curriculum for Old Questions (2019). Nurul loves smelling old books, looking after plant babies, and hopes to adopt a cat someday.
Exhibition: Ho Rui An & Shubigi Rao
Asia the Unmiraculous by Ho Rui An (2018–20, 71 min),
The Pelagic Tracts by Shubigi Rao (2018, 25 min)
Ho’s video installation Asia the Unmiraculous seeks to diffuse the aura of a “miraculous” Asia by examining the entirely profane conditions that set the stage for the first large-scale crisis of globalisation. Ho considers the conditions that made possible the “Asianisation” of the miracle and the crisis that followed.
14 digital prints in the style of real estate listings accompanies the video installation. One such example was a poster detailing the construction of high-speed rail networks as part of China’s ongoing Belt and Road initiative, revealing a juxtaposition when one recalls the history of Chinese immigrants’ labour and involvement in the First Transcontinental Railroad of the United States back in the 1860s.
Hosted in conjunction with Ho’s work, we see a return of Shubigi Rao as she presented her film, The Pelagic Tracts. Shubigi, visual artist, writer and theorist is no stranger to Per°Form having been its inaugural Fellow presented in May 2021. The Pelagic Tracts brings to focus her concern with lived histories of painful destructions and challenged the way we view what is worthy of preservation. In this film, she charts the history of lost and damaged books through a mythical world from existing letters and records from the libraries, archives, and her interactions in Kochi with local librarians and paper pulpers, as well as the libraries devastated by the floods in 2018.
This is the first time that both works have been exhibited in Singapore.
Media Release: T:>Works’ Per°Form returns with Ho Rui An and a critical perspective on the Asian “miracle”
From Crisis to Value*
Digital Keynote by Ho Rui An
Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT) / 1pm (CET) / 7pm (ET) / 3.30pm (IRST)
After a successful inaugural keynote in May 2021 by Per°Form Fellow Shubigi Rao, T:>Works Per°Form returns with a second Fellow, artist and writer Ho Rui An. He will deliver a two-part programme that began with the digital keynote, From Crisis to Value*. The keynote draws from his in-situ research in multiple Asian countries investigating the effects of globalism on Asian financial capitals. Following the keynote is his video installation, Asia the Unmiraculous, which opened in artspace 72-13, Singapore.
In the digital keynote From Crisis to Value*, Ho discusses his recent and ongoing bodies of work exploring the material networks and geopolitical imaginaries that have animated the regions of East and Southeast Asia. He will guide us through his research trajectory that began with his investigation of the so-called Asian financial crisis of the late nineties, to the political economy of post-reform China, and is now focused on the impact of the pandemic and the new socioeconomic realities it presents us with. Spanning the mediums of performance, film, and installation, the works produced from this research have variously examined the relationship between race and financial capitalism, the student as a figure of capitalist modernity and radical culture, the displacement of class politics by a discourse of anti-corruption amidst the systemic crises of late capitalism, and, most recently, the textile industry and its many afterlives within the Greater China region.
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 by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Kunsthalle Wien; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; and Para Site, Hong Kong. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
Per°Form Inaugural Digital Lecture by Shubigi Rao
Digital Lecture by Shubigi Rao
Hosted by Dr. Ong Keng Sen.
Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT) / 2pm (CET) / 8am (EDT)
Per°Form begins with the inaugural digital lecture by artist Shubigi Rao on 6 May 2021. The lecture will focus on three main areas of Shubigi’s practice – as a writer, an artist, and as an artist-curator for the 5th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2021, and the overlaps and tensions between them.
Shubigi will discuss the connections between on-site artistic production and her work as artist-curator, as well as the ways in which artistic strategies inform curatorial research. Drawing from her curatorial experiences in a pandemic-affected world, she will also examine the position of artist-curator within a potentially fraught biennale-model, and the forms of knowledge generation that could potentially be sustained through such curatorial research and practice.
Artist and writer Shubigi Rao’s interests include archival systems, histories, lies and ecologies. Her works examine displacement of people, cultures, or knowledge bodies. Her current project on book destruction and knowledge, “Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book” has garnered numerous awards from AIGA, APB Foundation, D&AD, and the Singapore Literature Prize. Shubigi has also been featured in various international exhibitions and is currently the Curator for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2021.