JAN 26, 2015 I KOCHI
Kochi: 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.
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.
“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”.
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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