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”
Artist and writer, Rui An, works in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance, and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes the ways images are produced, circulate, and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennale; Kochi Muziris Biennale; Kunsthalle Wien; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhiven; 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.
Artist and writer Shubigi’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. She has also been featured in various international exhibitions and is currently the Curator for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2021.