Ho Rui An’s biennale
installation combines thought and humour
Kochi, Jan 20: Ho Rui An was
born in Singapore, but to attribute that tropical island’s hot and humid
climate to the youngster’s fixation with the sun and sweat in his work at Kochi-Muziris
Biennale (KMB) will be a wrong take.
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| Ho Rui An |
For, the 24-year-old
artist says his performative talk and installation at the ongoing KMB’14 is a
takeoff from an image he stumbled upon inside a heritage repository at the Netherlands
capital known for its largely salubrious air. At Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, diminutive
Ho encountered a statue of titanic Dutch anthropologist Charles Le Roux.
The sight
inspired Ho; he was even more captivated by the degree of perspiration that was
evident in the visual of Le Roux (1885-1947). Today, the Singaporean, who
divides time between USA and his homeland, is up with a video that combines the
depth of a philosopher with the quirky humour of a youngster.
If his ‘Sun,
Sweat, Solar Queens: An Expedition’ looks at the history of colonialism, the
KMB’14 work at the main Aspinwall House venue in Fort Kochi is also one that
would merit the visitor’s time to mull over.
One part of
the installation is an image of the statue of Le Roux that Ho saw in 1864-founded
Tropenmuseum. Ho came to know deeper about the anthropologist as one who had conducted
field work in the Dutch East Indies in the early 20th century. A curios Ho
noticed that the statue depicts him at work, with the back of his shirt
drenched in sweat. That became a motif in his work at the biennale here.
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| A visitor at the installation Sun, Sweat, Solar, QueensAn Expedition of Artist Ho Rui An on display at Aspinwall House, the main venue of Kochi Muziris Biennale 2014. |
“My point of
departure was the sweat on Le Roux’s shirt. It made me think about the sun in
the empire and the age of expedition,” says the Singaporean, who is also a writer.
“This gives these men, who had a desire to enter into the unknown, more than
just a disembodied feel. The sweat becomes an important indicator for labour
and relationships within the empire.”
The work also
has a video projection of Ho’s talk given in the inaugural week at KMB ’14 last
month. The talk—interspersed with filmic and documentary clips—puts across the
notion of a “global domestic” and a “world of global displacement” as against
globalisation.
The
photograph and the video are connected, in a way, by a little statue of Queen
Elizabeth II or Ho’s “solar queen”, which does the royal wave powered by a
solar panel; the artist points the panel is “placed on her bag rather than her
back”.
“My work is
about what it means to open to the world,” says Ho, whom KMB’14 curator Jitish
Kallat first met as a student at London’s Goldsmith College, and then in New
York, where he was also pursuing his studies. “There are often tensions and
contradictions, and my work chooses to negotiate these politics.”
In keeping
with his motif of sweat, Ho rounds of his talk with the time he saw the Queen
at her Diamond Jubilee celebration and his “illusion of her was broken”. After
she had waved to the crowds and she turned to return to the barge that was
going down the River Thames, “for a fraction of a second, I swear I saw her
sweaty back”, he says to loud laughter.
Ho says that
an element of history in his work made it exciting for him to be at his first
biennale and “see so much history embedded in the region”.
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| Artist Ho Rui An describing his installation to a gathering at Aspinwall House, the main venue of Kochi Muziris Biennale 2014. |
Notes
Melanie Pelzer, who is visiting with her husband from Germany: “It is good to
experience the social and philosophical depth of Ho’s work. I love that the
biennale makes you think”.
Kallat says Ho's
work lies at the cross-road where cinema, performance, narration and theory
meet. “His performance lecture at KMB was a richly layered garland of imagery
and ideas full of imagination, insight and irony,” he adds.
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