FFF5 | Lectures/Performances | 1st Day

19:00 | "Solar: A Meltdown" (2014) | Performed in English with Greek subtitles | 60 minutes | No latecomers will be admitted once the performance has started.

"Solar: A Meltdown" is a lecture that takes off from the sweaty back of a mannequin of the anthropologist Charles le Roux that the artist encountered in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. From this image launches a series of investigations that attempts to get to the “behinds” of Empire and more crucially, the merciless sun behind it, beating down on the imperial back. Probing this “solar unconscious” underpinning the European colonial project, the lecture further considers the white woman and the punkawallah (manual fan operator) as figures constitutive of a “global domestic”— an all-encompassing, air-conditioned planetary interior. Spiralling into the contemporary moment of terrestrial meltdown, it finally seeks to reclaim sweat as a way of getting out of ourselves and in touch with the Solar."
—Ho Rui An

Concept, Direction & Performance: Ho Rui An
Dramaturgy: Tang Fu Kuen
Technical Design: ARTFACTORY
Production & Technical Management: Yap Seok Hui | ARTFACTORY

20:30 | "The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia" | Performed in English | 60 minutes
"The term ‘Southeast Asia’ emerged at the close of the Second World War, a nomenclature invented by the Allied forces to describe a particular theatre of war. The "Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia" begins as a question: what constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia - a region never unified by language, religion or political power? "The Dictionary" proceeds by proposing 26 terms – one for each letter of the English / Latin alphabet, each a concept, a motif, or a biography that suggests an approach to the thinking and imagining of the region.
In 2016, my collaborators and I created a platform for absorbing and annotating online audio-visual materials, which are in turn ‘fed’ into a specially created ‘algorithmic editing system’ that endlessly creates new audio-visual combinations according to conceptual parameters based on the 26 terms. The workings of this is visible on a website. I think of this as my working journal, and the film endlessly put together by the system, my journal’s animated dream."
The lecture takes us through the A, B, Cs of the Dictionary and the projects it has spawned.
—Ho Tzu Nyen

21:30 | After lecture performances a discussion will follow among the artists and June Yap, Director of Curatorial, Programmes and Publications at the Singapore Art Museum.