Solar Orders (2023)

Solar Orders (work-in-progress) is a moving-image work that envisions a fictional future premised on real-world observations that the tropics are expanding due to the climate crisis. Fermenting in our collective anxiety, might climate forecasts come to be seen as predictions, and eventually as prophecy?

Within the work, solar orders shape future societies where the sun forms the central organising principle, even a philosophy of the future milieus. From our myriad energy needs to the food we eat, what would it mean to submit oneself to the superabundance of the sun? Soundtracked by five electronic producers from across the tropics: Gatasanta (Columbia), Lynn Nandar Htoo (Myanmar), Disco Puppet (India), Trypas Corassão (Brazil), Authentically Plastic (Uganda). What of music’s role in connecting the terrestrial to the solar, at different moments of our path around the sun?

Bringing together storytelling, myths, and music, Solar Orders speculates upon these future societies and of landscapes of the temperate zones turning into deserts, turning subsequently into the tropics.

Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. Recently he was a resident of Gasworks (2022), Medialab Matadero (2022), Jan van Eyck Academie (2019/20), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017/18). He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks, Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, National University Singapore Museum, and de Appel.