The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) has curated and designed two building-wide exhibition seasons this year. The first half featured three distinct solo exhibitions by artists Irena Haiduk, Cici Wu, and Ash Moniz, while the fall/winter program is set to open this November.
Amidst the high turnover rates typical of contemporary art institutions in China, RAM has chosen a path characterized by a slower pace, deeper resonance, and a stronger demand for meaningful engagement. Midway through the first exhibition cycle, Curator-to-go conducted an in-depth interview with Canadian interdisciplinary artist Ash Moniz, exploring their works, the exhibition, and their creative philosophy. Moniz’s research centers on exposing the hidden violence, fragmentation, emptiness, and absences within global supply chain systems, proposing ways to scrutinize geopolitics and explore possibilities for solidarity among neighboring entities.
While viewing the exhibitions, we developed a keen interest in Ash Moniz’s thematic concerns and daily working realities. Currently based in Gaza, Moniz shared via email correspondence that within the recent short span of time, a member of their film crew had tragically lost life. Their own state of being is also undergoing immense strain. Behind their lighthearted words lie the stark realities of today’s regional warfare—an intangible yet near, ceaselessly haunting, heavy hiss.
Interviewer: Ash Moniz
Interviewee: Roxy Y. Tang
【Lightning round】
- In today’s fractured landscape of global connections, how has working on a project in mainland China influenced or inspired your practice?
Because I’ve worked on many projects in mainland China (I studied sculpture at Nanjing University of the Arts back in 2013), hosting the survey show here allows my practice come full circle. Also because China is a massive logistical power, with such a central role in global shipping, it makes perfect sense to have a common origin of global supply chains be the site of this exhibition, especially now that the museum is free and the concept of a “general public” isn’t as sculpted by class-dynamics.
It may seem ironic that I have some important freedoms in China that I would never have in the Western world, such the freedom to talk about Palestine and directly support Palestinians in Gaza. This is one of the ways in which the internationalism of Palestinian solidarity may help shift the hegemony (that the west has on the contemporary art world) elsewhere, to where not being gaslit into supporting the genocide of Palestinians is a possible reality.
- In the newly commissioned work Distance from Zero, presented on the fourth floor under the theme of “Labor,” the film continues your exploration of delay, inefficiency, and systemic collapse within structures of governance. Supplemented by provisional and violent sculptural elements such as binding straps, this 20-minute short film expands into the physical space of the exhibition. What kind of viewing were you hoping to create through this spatial intervention?
Being suspended in time/place is central to the cognitive possibility of “seafarer abandonment”, where ships are deleted from the flow of circulation (with workers onboard). Because the ships no longer exist (legally), workers cannot disembark, and thus become trapped on board; a precise fixity defined by suspending logistical-time, being dislocated from the chain of supply. The logical absurdity of seafarer abandonment can be seen in Mohammed Aisha’s case (which this project refers to), where he could physically swim to shore (from the ship he was trapped on for 4 years), but couldn’t legally swim to shore, due to the lack of a “ship”, (suffering the material implications of an epistemic violence). This form of legal physics is central to the affective/spatial experience of the work, through the frictions between concept and form. As a fragmented constellation with no resolving propositions, this whole project is not “about” seafarer abandonment, it’s about “how to think about” seafarer abandonment; about the train of thought itself – the ships and supply-chains of thought that also become arrested.
- Another commissioned piece, [inaudible], situated deep within the “Silence” section on the fifth floor, documents your collaboration and life with the avant-garde band Osprey V from Gaza. Through both sound and image, how and why do you draw a distinction between “silence” and “inaudible”?
Raji needed silence to record his vocals, while surrounded constantly by sounds of bombing and children crying. As such, “searching for silence” became a central theme, and a politics of soundproofing defined the resilience of what’s necessary to record songs in such horrific conditions.
The concept of silence in the title [Inaudible] (2025) speaks to the feeling that no matter how loud people in Gaza scream, no one is listening. Silence produced by an unwillingness to listen. Everyone knows that children are being slaughtered everyday in Gaza, but it’s ignored by global institutions/media. Even if we do hear the catastrophe, the fact that Israel is committing it cannot be heard, only that Gaza is facing it. It’s a linguistic violence that constitutes what’s hearable.
Framed by this violence of unlistening, [Inaudible] is a film about being heard: about musicians who risk their lives to have a voice and produce powerful sounds. It’s about listening to the sound of what it takes to have a voice; an act of hearing/being-heard that shapes the musical temporality of this acoustic project.
- The suspended conference table installed in the upper levels of the building—formerly the site of the Royal Asiatic Society (R.A.S.)—presents only objects, with the human presence conspicuously absent. The “crack” or absence it suggests seems to evoke geopolitical tensions, but perhaps not exclusively so. Would you like to share more about the symbolic or spatial thinking behind this site-specific design?
This specific type of absence – the hole in the conference table – speaks to the cracks in international institutions and the failures of their promises. While normally people sit outside to face each other, here, the microphones are instead pointed inwards; into the hole in the center of the table, amplifying its voice.The holes in the UN can be heard so loudly, and it’s worth actively listening to what’s missing, in these forms of union between sovereignties.
It looks at the dialectics of “speechlessness”. On one hand those experiencing/witnessing the genocide in Gaza are completely speechless due to the inability of language to capture the magnitude of this horror. On the other hand, the international bodies of law/diplomacy are speechless in the sense that they are not speaking about these horrors when they should. There is a massive hole in speech where Gaza lies. We are hearing an absence, but how do we actually listen to what’s not being said. Not only to point out that something is not being said, but to actually listen to it.
【In-depth feature】
- Visitors navigate across three floors of the exhibition, embedding their bodies into a simulated system of cargo circulation—experiencing and reflecting on issues of labor, time, and structural inequality within the framework of global trade. As a central conceptual gesture, how did this spatial setup come into being, step by step?
It happened through a form of co-constitution, where the whole exhibition becomes the space between its individual parts. In a sense every floor is the negative space of each other, connected through the opening from the 4th floor to the 6th floor.
The constellation of relations between works is important because of the role constellations play in the logistical infrastructures of global violence. In much of the show, the space between the artworks is a proposition. For example, an entire half of the 5th floor could be considered one artwork “How to Make a Flute” where the alignment of spatial holes produces an insinuation of a tunnel between each hole, in the walls that demarcate each project/story. As most works are about gaps in global systems, a central question for this show was: what happens when these gaps are aligned to produce a vacuum (as negative energy).
For example, this is central to the proposition made by the 6th floor Proximate (2025), where the holes in logistical time (aka docker’s strikes) are all aligned with each other to produce an undercurrent geography. I spent over a decade researching work-stoppages/refusals in global supply chains as being a form of temporal negativity (which has an entire history to how it has been conceptualized by logistical managers). I see this negative time as analogous to the way in which the cinematic film-strip “is haunted by the absence located in the gaps between frames”. Logistically speaking work stoppages are the gaps between frames that forever haunt logistics in the paradox that logistics’ greatest threat is the very thing that it relies on: its labour. The fact that at the end of the day, the circulation of goods is only possible because of people. People who have feelings and opinions, and desires for a better world.
This obsession with the possibility of holes and gaps was a guiding factor in the spatial layout, that technically developed over the two years of working with RAM, but in reality it developed over the entire decade of me trying to make sense of the ways in which the hauntings of negative space shaped my understanding of the world. That’s why Just Tell Them It’s an Artwork (2025) is not curatorially coincidental (where the production budget is smuggled to Gaza through an artwork that was never made) it is a material proposition that puzzles together what the whole constellation of artworks is attempting to propose about negative space.
This spatial set-up evolved step by step over time, through a preparatory collaboration with the museum that lasted years, through site-visits and floor-plans. I can’t write a whole answer about the labour/sociality of how things are produced, and then claim that I as a singular artist am the source of merit for the spatial set-up, considering ROLL contributed massively. It’s fascinating how taboo it is to admit that there are teams of people hired by the museum to help design/produce the works. We thought creatively together, in a way that I see as being collaborative.
I’m interested in how adamantly it is hidden in contemporary art culture. Especially when it comes to creative decision-making, as often times crucial artistic decisions might not have even come from the artist, but to acknowledge this is “shameful” because it deters from the myth of the artist’s singularity of genius.
- In important earlier works such as In the Anticipation of a Future Need to Know (2017) and Hijacking Hindsight (2019), what kind of future—or rather, what kind of present—were you attempting to reveal?
Anticipation and hindsight shape the temporalities that supply-chains rely on. The invention of what is known as “Just-In-time Logistics” primarily was born through replacing a) the time that cargo is stored, with b) the transit time it takes to get somewhere, sharing their negative spaces through time-compression. The one month it may take until the cargo is demanded becomes the one month that it may take for cargo to arrive. This lead to current trends of “anticipatory shipping”, analyzing consumers’ behavioral patterns to assume which products they might buy, and send those products to towards them, before the’ve even been purchased. This temporality of supply meets that of speculation. The role of insurance, which was historically born out of maritime trade, is based on the possibility of “what could” happen, as is the role of preemptive securitization (which is encoded in global shipping’s impulse towards loss-prevention).
In the Anticipation of a Future Need to Know (2017) is a part of larger project that maps where the supply chain of documents and documentality of supply chains intersect, through a script based on researching how paper cargo is transported from the port to the state bureaucracy building (for permits, passports, authorizations, identification-records, etc.). The anticipation in the title refers to the logistical impulse within the archival practice of policing, collecting information on people just in case it may eventually be useful in the future.
In Hijacking Hindsight (2019), the possibility of something occurring has infrastructural influence on what occurs in the present. For example, it is a work about the possibility of risk and the threat of logistical stoppage, made in the Suez Canal in 2019, two years prior to the economic catastrophe in 2021 where the Evergreen ship blocked the Suez Canal for one entire week. It’s not coincidental that this work predicts historical moments, because all of these possibilities are already encoded into the genomes of their material armature. For example, any global canal is inherently threatened by vulnerabilities, because they are chokepoints, where all traffic is narrowed into one singular pathway that has the possibility to be blocked.
I travelled to a massive frozen body of water, with physical archival artifacts from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, to bring the past into the current historical moment in which Maersk inaugurates a shipping route in the North Pole that was formed from the melting glacial ice-caps. Because Maersk’s strategy of advertising (narrativizing) this shipping route was to sell it specifically as an alternative to the Red Sea route (due to the extent of risk, threat, and vulnerabilities), the imperial deflection away from another geography is what ontologically defines this one.
This type of present is situated within complex restructurings of history, how the threat of one place’s potential failure can haunt some place else entirely. The works look at the economies of what “could” happen, and how possibilities become commodities within the supply-chain. How the current moment is haunted by different futures, that shape what constitutes the present.
Both policing and the securitization of supply-chains are shaped by these temporalities. What is police/securitized in shipping is never actually a protection of citizens through the prevention of transported threats, what is policed/securitized in shipping (interruption, stoppage, and loss) is precisely that which threatens the continuity of the supply-chain’s eternal flow, and sovereignty as a flow.
- Through the colorful marker-drawn map Proximate on the glass window of the sixth-floor library, you propose the concept of “proximity” as both condition and possibility, offering transnational collaboration as a lightweight yet painterly response to the complex issues surfaced by the exhibition. From a (non-)fictional standpoint, how do you see the role of art in shaping real-world action?
The inevitable paradox that haunts logistics, is that its ultimate goal is its ultimate threat: to connect the world. If ports/ships are more connected, that inevitably means that port/ship workers are more connected as a result. This is why this industry has always been haunted by powerful networks of labor, from which historical forms of internationalism have been born. For Proximate (2025), I spent a decade researching which ports are each others closest allies (for reasons undefined by geographical proximity), to redraw the world with a rubric of geographical closeness defined by solidarity (ie. which ports go on strike in solidarity with others).
This image of this map is a form of witnessing that allows viewers to imagine implications of historical solidarities. It’s an aesthetic proposition of usefulness for a collective political imaginary. This work has utility in that a) it provides a blueprint for a type of international solidarity, and b) it opens a crack in the realms of imagination that are crucial to be able to “see” horizons of possibility. It’s useful to know the actual historical relations between dock-workers, but it’s also useful for the fact of simply knowing that we actually have more power than we think, and that the possibilities of radical solidarity could have a material chance.
Drawn to its logical conclusion, if every port worker in the world went on strike at the same time, global capitalism would come to a halt, due to the extent to which everything relies on shipping. If (according to the IMO) 90% of all goods in the world travel by sea (bombs, oil, etc.), then a lack of ships is a lack of access to all that these systems of violence require to uphold themselves, as legitimate leverage for demands. Armies cannot bomb innocent civilians if they are unable to be supplied with bombs. This collective power could happen, as “could” does not mean likelihood is high, it means its technically possible (the difference between probability and possibility). This does not mean that I naively believe that everything is going to be ok, because the workers will save the day (projecting some teleological redemption onto people), but it’s about listening to the material infrastructures of solidarity that already exist and allowing horizons (of hypothetical possibility) to guide strategy in the present.
The work’s ethos is evident in the painterly act, not only in the manual labour of doing all of this by hand, but in the fact that anyone can draw this, there is an elementary nature to this proposition, which is exemplified by using marker as a material. If the routes between faraway ports are drawn by colonial/logistical assumptions of “natural” inevitability, then what if the actual geographical distance between ports was redefined by their proximity along other rubrics entirely?
- The exhibition also includes a particularly controversial gesture: the budget for one commissioned work was redirected in reality to support an under-resourced region, leaving behind only a plaque titled Just Tell Them it’s an Artwork as evidence of an event marked by disappearance and regeneration. On this panel, would you say its artistic “quality” was increased, diminished, or equivalently transformed in the process?
I’m not sure exactly what’s controversial. But still, Gaza isn’t an “under-resourced region”, its resources are actively torn away from them. It wouldn’t feel right to call a concentration camp an under-resourced region. The money was sent to help people survive, not because they are poor, but because they are experiencing forced starvation – as ethnic cleansing committed by Israel and the United States.
Somehow the fact that it is not an artwork – I’m just using the magic powers of being an artist to declare that taking the commission money and giving to families in Gaza is in fact the art work – is precisely what gives its meaning as an artwork. The “theft” (or heist) of using art as an excuse to smuggle money for a more useful purpose is its form. The artistic quality of this work was always coincidental, but I’ve loved how it has become substantial in the process. I was surprised to see the way in which people engaged with the work, and how the lighting really turned the outlined emptiness into a particularly haunted space that audiences can move through.
In the same way that other works of mine question the difference between probability/possibility through the word “could”, the linguistic choice of the writing is important. I say “where a large-scale installation could have been”, but I never say that I was ever actually going to make it, just that it could have been here. The work’s artistic quality is definitely validated by the nexus of relation that is an entire exhibition that largely talks about gaps, and empty spaces, and that which is not there. The fact that the haunting of the art installation that was never made is the thing to be be experienced, is framed by the other logistical hauntings that shape the exhibition, and art works that don’t exist (such as the film with the Beirut Port Workers that we deleted together after filming).
Yuting (Roxy) TANG 