Big Business: Alternative Economies of Performance, or Why the Hell You Want to Stage a Performance in an Art Fair?

A conversation with Bhenji Ra, Brian Fuata and Joshua Serafin, moderated by X Zhu-Nowell.

An art fair is already a kind of involuntary stage: hyper-visible, transactional, crowded with competing temporalities and attention economies. So why stage performance here? And what other economies might performance produce beyond the logics of the marketplace?

This conversation brings together three artists whose practices move through Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait and ART SG’s inaugural Performance Art sector to examine how performance operates across radically different economies of value, exchange, and circulation. Joshua Serafin’s Relics confronts the colonial erasure of Indigenous warrior identities through embodied memory and transoceanic kinship. Bhenji Ra’s Sissy in the Straits transforms The Warehouse Hotel through sirenic navigation, drawing on the site’s histories of maritime labor and red-light district intimacies. Brian Fuata’s improvisatory appearances drift through the fair like weather, sometimes present, sometimes withdrawing, questioning the very terms of visibility and presence.

Together, these artists offer a provocation: What if performance doesn’t simply adapt to commercial contexts but exposes the structures of attention, desire, and power already at work? From Indigenous cosmologies that refuse colonial time, to the informal economies that have long accompanied port cities, to the staging of vulnerability within spaces designed for transaction—this conversation asks what alternative models of value, duration, and relation performance might engender. What economies are we rehearsing when we perform?

Speakers:
Bhenji Ra – Artist, Australia
Brian Fuata – Artist, Australia
Joshua Serafin – Artist, Philippines/Belgium

Moderated by:
X Zhu-Nowell – Executive Director and Chief Curator, Rockbund Art Museum