In 2018 Outset Netherlands was delighted to support the production of the large-scale print and lecture performance Tripping Troping by the artist Ho Rui An for the exhibition UnAuthorised Medium in Framer Framed, curated by Annie Jael Kwan.
In this lecture, artist Ho Rui An shared his artistic process working between archival and field research in approaching the comparative histories and contemporaneity of Southeast/East Asia. Thinking between the positionalities of tripping – to take a trip, but also to stumble – and troping – to turn something into a trope, but also to turn – the artist reflected on the contingencies that shape our embodied encounters with a world mediated by image.
The group exhibition UnAuthorised Medium, curated by Annie Jael Kwan, brought together works by internationally established and emerging artists who have deep connections to Southeast Asia, while also working extensively across the globe. Appropriating its title from áp vong, the Vietnamese secularised ritual of invoking the ‘dead’, the exhibition evoked the 'ghosts' - 'glitches' - in the archive. Through a range of artistic practices, including a variety of lens-based works, drawing and mixed media installation, the artists disrupted dominant systems of knowledge, reclaiming and reconstructing the erased, invisible and fictional to engage with the historical and contested paradigm of ‘Southeast Asia’.
