Solar: A Meltdown

A visit to the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum: Strolling through the museum, Ho Rui An comes across the wax figure of anthropologist Charles Le Roux. But something is fishy: The figure’s back is bathed in sweat! This is the key moment for Ho Rui An’s ironic and intelligent lecture performance, tracing the motif of the sun-plagued colonialist throughout Western history of art and film up to our present day. Sweaty, shirtless males in the jungle, the perfect white woman who never suffers from damp armpits, even in the most relentless heat, and a manual fan, operated by a native servant. Who breaks a sweat – and why? At the same time, the performance uses the construction of gigantic air-conditioned shopping malls for tourists in Singapore to examine the ecological consequences of colonialism – and not least the issue of what all of this has to do with us.