Heman Chong’s “Index (Down)” (2009) from the series “Surfacing”, 2009 consists of thousands adhesive stickers recalling the red triangle symbol used as a simple visual shorthand in financial charts and terminals to indicate a drop in stock prices. Applied freely to a wall over the course of a single day, the work accumulates into a diffuse field. When it was first shown in 2009, in “Sequelism: Possible, Probable, or Preferable Futures” at Arnolfini in Bristol (curated by Latitudes with Nav Haq), global financial markets and banking systems—not to mention millions of people—had just undergone the extreme stress caused by the 2008 U.S. financial institutions’ risky lending. The work somehow reflected a humanised consequence, a symbol waterfall composed from an abstract system’s daily flow.

The work has been installed many times since, and as the prospect of a protracted conflict in the Persian Gulf hardens, and its economic reverberations, along with its human and environmental costs, deepen, the work acquires yet another inflection. Ups-and-downs are morphing into more pervasive disorientation. Volatility suggests not merely a reaction to events, but an expression of markets exceeding their very capacity to anticipate. Energy markets surge, while financial markets oscillate in response to banalities, mendacities, and ever-shifting narrative sands. Businesses and central bankers struggle to navigate an environment that defies any clear strategy, while crypto gamblers and insider traders position themselves to profit, and the wider public bears the brunt of rising living costs.

As Jean-Baptiste Fressoz—a historian who spoke at the 2017 conference convened by Latitudes to accompanying the exhibition “4.543 Billion: The Matter of Matter” at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux—points out in his latest book, “Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk” (Verso Books, 2024), it is misleading to tell a story of a modernity in which societies inadvertently caused environmental havoc without contemplating the consequences of their decisions. To sleepwalk into disaster, ignorance and disinhibition—contemplating danger and yet normalising it—have to be actively produced in a calculated way, brought to fruition as much as knowledge itself.

Chong’s work, once a meditation on “classic” cause-and-effect market anxieties, now seems to mirror a world in which hubris and catastrophic systemic risk coexist with logic and madness, deliberate and inadvertent at the same time, and where the triangles might no longer simply point down, but move us towards somewhere truly beyond comprehension.