Ho Rui An, Between Two Trees | Performance

Saturday 8 August | 4:30pm | Len Lye Cinema

Alongside his first presentation in Aotearoa, you’re invited to an opening weekend performance lecture by Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An.

In 1960, Goh Keng Swee, the finance minister and architect of Singapore’s nascent industrialisation programme, felled a tree on the offshore island of Pulau Bukom to mark the start of construction of Singapore’s first oil refinery. In 1963, almost exactly three years later to the day, prime minister Lee Kuan Yew planted a tree to launch a nationwide greening movement that would in time transform Singapore into an internationally recognised “city in a garden”. Reading between these two seemingly conflicting inauguration scenes, Between Two Trees traces the curious entanglements between botany and petroleum in a city-state that has grown to become one of the world’s largest physical trading hubs for refined fuel despite having no natural crude reserves. Reframing the island city’s postcolonial repopulation by greenery as political scenography, the lecture examines the role of the capitalist state as constant gardener and how Singapore’s complicity in the global military-petroindustrial complex thereby falls away from the “political” scene—one in which trees serve as an unexamined backdrop literally obscuring the oil tankers sitting off the country’s coasts. In unsettling this all-too-natural scenery, what is further unearthed is the very grounds upon which politics itself vanishes from an imaginary of global capital as a sphere of purely economic relations.  

 
Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Through lectures, essays and films, his research examines the relations between labour, technology and capital across different systems of governance in a global age. He has presented projects at the Shanghai Biennale; Bangkok Art Biennale’ Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien; Singapore Art Museum; and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. 


This is a free performance lecture that takes place in the Len Lye Cimema, space is limited so please book your free spot.
 

Image: Courtesy of Singapore Press Holdings Limited.