Ashley Ho
With every step, touch, we are reading the world in parts. I feel that my body is sprawled across the world, across the homes it is always leaving. This practice desires unproductive time, time taken to fall-into-knowing. How do we live in a world we know we are always losing? I worry that I forget to say goodbye to things before we disappear to each other, that loss takes me by surprise (as it always does anyway).
There is playful irony in the fact that this approach towards quantification is activated through clearly imprecise methodologies. On whose terms do I measure? and with what weight?
Ashley Ho
With every step, touch, we are reading the world in parts. I feel that my body is sprawled across the world, across the homes it is always leaving. This practice desires unproductive time, time taken to fall-into-knowing. How do we live in a world we know we are always losing? I worry that I forget to say goodbye to things before we disappear to each other, that loss takes me by surprise (as it always does anyway).
There is playful irony in the fact that this approach towards quantification is activated through clearly imprecise methodologies. On whose terms do I measure? and with what weight?
as it happens i meet you again
as it happens i meet you again
Dramaturg's Notes
How many of Ashley’s right forearm is the distance of this stream?
What does all this measuring do?
Essentially does it change anything?
Amsterdam-based artist Ashley Ho draws on her research into measuring spaces. Using units of her body as a tool of measurement, she sees her practice as being laden with futility. Through these films, Ashley offers a commentary on her futile attempts to measure the vast mountainous landscapes of the Central Eastern Alps. She is driven by a desire to re-know, bid farewell to and become reacquainted with a place. Just as a nomad constantly charts out a new routine in a fresh base, could the act of measuring using abstracted body parts be read as a way of seeking out who we are in the place we are at? In doing so, Ashley questions preconceived notions of utility and value, of art and being an artist, and of taking comfort in being human.
For this platform, Ashley creates films that can be seen as refracted versions of each other. This allows for one to view them as an archive of practice, as an artwork or as both. In one film, she visually highlights the actual process of measuring the landscape. For her, the measuring becomes the writing of space in real time and is intended as an introduction to her practice. The playscript that accompanies the film was also created based on unique encounters while hiking for eight days, as well as events that were unfolding beyond the mountains at the same time. In the other film, she pixelates and re-crafts the same visuals – offering a different way to connect with the film. This editing technique takes inspiration from her grainy footage when she was measuring Dam Square. The translation of the images via editing aims to remember and honour the time that had been dedicated to that endeavor in the city.
The music score across both films has been created by Domenik Naue through an ongoing conversation with Ashley that included graphic scoring and sound recordings. Designed using the children's musical instrument, triola – a hand-tuned wind harmonica that creates single-tone sustained notes according to the length of one’s breath – this soundscape also becomes an abstracted unit from the human body’s capacities. When paired with different visual styles, Ashley invites audience to understand the soundscapes anew. In one film the soundscape functions as background music. On the other hand, the rich and continuous flow of colours in the other speaks volume of how soundscape interact with visuals to create affective sensations. One may even choose to rewatch the films with their eyes closed or with different degrees of attentiveness. When taken as a pair, the films serve to ignite conversations about what art could be.
About Artist(s)
Ashley Ho
ho yuhan ashley (she/they, b. 1999) is a Singaporean artist who works from the perspective of movement. a leaking body, her work plays across performance, -making, writing, graphic design, sound-tinkering, filmmaking, and scenography. she is presently preoccupied with time, access, responsibility, and how we live together, alongside a persistent curiosity for composition. as a performer, her experience includes processes with Ingrid Berger Myhre, Ula Sickle, Zarah Bracht, David Weber-Krebs, Dries Verhoeven, Marjolein Vogels, Coralie Vogelaar, Dunja Jocic, Dario Tortorelli, and Keren Rosenberg. during her 2018 internship with Frontier Danceland, ashley also worked with Shahar Binyamini and Richard Chappell. as a maker, her performance work has been presented at Dansateliers Rotterdam, De Nieuwe Oost, Dance Nucleus, Our Softest Hour, and Stre@m – An Asian Digital Dance Platform.
her writing has been published in artistic research journals such as Leonorana Revista and FUSE by Dance Nucleus, and her first poetry collection, Without Sound Now, was published in 2019 by Math Paper Press. in 2022, ashley completed her dancer/maker studies at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, with the support of the Singapore National Arts Council Scholarship. ashley wants to move from a place of joy. she sees performance as a social, political, intimate practice of transforming and being transformed. she looks for the moment when something is twisting into something else but not quite yet, like how the precision of this biography is already fluctuating at this moment, even before arriving to you. she non-ironically lives by newton’s law of conservation of energy.
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