Ho Rui An: DASH - Performance + Lecture

You are welcome to join the performance-lecture DASH by the artist Ho Rui An taking place on Thursday 5 April, 15.00, at the auditorium of the Van Abbe. Attendance is free with a valid museum ticket.

DASH

Opening with footage of an accident captured from a dashcam, DASH considers how the accident—or crisis—becomes legible within a risk-managed and financially hedged era. While the dashcam was originally designed as a device that bears witness to the accidents that happen to the vehicle to which it is fitted, its proliferation in recent years has inadvertently yielded a contemporary index of the accident in the form of the vast accumulation of crash footage on the Internet. Taking this condition of the dashcam as a point of departure, the lecture considers the broader logic of “horizon scanning” that underpins the foresight programmes of the Singapore government, which combine big data and scenario planning as tools for “surprise anticipation”. 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 extinguishing others.

HO RUI AN

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. He writes, talks and thinks around images, with an interest in investigating their emergence, transmission and disappearance within contexts of globalism and governance.

TRADE MARKINGS

On April 7, the exhibition Trade Markings. Frontier Imaginaries Ed. No. 5: will open in the Van Abbemuseum.