​Drive(s) Through

​Minna Valjakka, Tini Aliman, Katarzyna Ancuta, Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

​Convened by Federico Ruberto (formAxioms / Hothouse) and Helios Singh Bajwa (The Opens)

​PRIMAL INSTINCT — Hothouse 2025 — Singapore

​Conceived as the finissage to PRIMAL INSTINCT, curated by Hothouse for Singapore Biennale 2025, this hybrid live–virtual symposium offers a platform for situating the positions and practices presented, deepening engagement with the exhibition’s conceptual and eco-cultural stakes. Through a series of presentations and conversations featuring the artists, scholars, curators, and audiences, participants are invited to delve into some of the discourses that have shaped the exhibition and its artworks, especially around eco-critical practice, pre-modern/post-naturalist cosmology, more-than-human entanglements, and strategic speculation. 

​Each segment will hold space for questions and discussion, encouraging open exchange between speakers and audience.

​The programme closes informally with food and drinks. Feel free to stay on, hang out, and continue the conversation.

​—

​SCHEDULE/PANELS

​4:00 - 4:10 PM

​PART 0 — Introduction by Federico Ruberto and Helios Singh Bajwa

​4:15 - 4:50 PM

​PART 1 — Tini Aliman & Minna Valjakka
Ecologies of Listening

​Sound is a key to how we make sense of the world—how it is constituted, structured, governed, experienced, remembered, and imagined. Amid growing interest in ecoacoustics, acoustemology, and attentive listening, sound practices open new ways of rethinking past and present cultural, social, political, and environmental conditions. Taking Tini Aliman’s Field Notes & the Ecology of Chance as the point of departure, this conversation addresses the ecological and decolonial aspects of sound, sonic engagement, and silence.

​4:50 - 5:50 PM

​PART 2 — Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee & Katarzyna Ancuta
goths in the tropics

​How does the Gothic live in Asia today? How has it been mutated by encounters with local ecosystems, cosmologies, and histories of modernity? Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee and cultural studies scholar Katarzyna Ancuta discuss the emergence, resonance, and urgency of distinctly Asian forms of the Gothic. If the Gothic has always been a mode for registering the repressed tensions of modernity, what can it reveal about our contemporary moment? 

​6:00 - 7:20 PM

​PART 3 — Keynote: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Enter Secret Society: Codes of Disappearance and Future Escape

​What did the earliest people dream of before they believed they were real? And how might one now escape the virtual, the digital, the artificial? Perhaps the first question contains a code of primal instinct that answers the second question. So does the ancient outrun the future. By exploring various secret societies of the past and future, this talk will envision a sect that could master the art of imperceptibility in an age of chronic surveillance, illumination, and screen capture. This would mean nothing less than restoring the dark side of thought itself (its mystery and incomprehensible mood) through new techniques of desertion, insomnia, masking, and oblivion. To that end, we will ask what secrecy even means today and how to formulate exit strategies in the face of a reality principle that draws every movement into the totality of the interface. A call to shadow within a time of biometric checkpoints, satellite drift, predictive modeling, retinal scans, and the humming datacenters of planetary memory. Becoming unlost.

​—

​SPEAKER BIOS

​Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His work tracks currents of experimental thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published ten books to date, including two volumes titled Omnicide I and II on madness, two volumes on Night titled Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark and Night II: A Philosophy of the Last World, and recent books on Evil and Future Theory. His latest manuscript involves a new philosophy of secrecy and secret societies. He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program and editor of the "Futures Theory" book series for Bloomsbury Press.

​Katarzyna Ancuta is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary gothic/horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. Her recent publications include contributions to The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (University of Wales Press, 2023), The Transmedia Vampire (McFarland, 2021), The New Urban Gothic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and B-Movie Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). She also co-edited two collections – Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (I. B. Tauris, 2016) and South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (University of Wales Press, 2022).

Minna Valjakka is an art historian focusing on various forms of urban creativity (such as street art, interventions, performances, and sound art) in relation to public spaces and civil society formation in East and Southeast Asian cities. Through locally-embedded, long-term research at the intersection of art studies, urban studies and environmental humanities, she examines urban creativity as a response to the distinctive trajectories of environmental crisis, geopolitical circumstances, developments in arts and cultural policies, and translocal mediations. She is a passionate researcher and has pursued to develop a multi-sited and comparative research through many years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in numerous locations. She has held a number of research fellowships and projects that have taken her to more than twenty cities across the region.

Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee is an artist, educator and research director whose practice negotiates post-tropical environments, psychic rupture, and the neo-gothic. Through new media, oration and public programming, she examines how excess and desire operate through obscured infrastructures and phenomena that shape prosaic experiences. She is an Associate Lecturer at the School of Media and Communication in London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

Tini Aliman is a sound artist, composer, field recordist and audio engineer whose practice sits at the intersection of theatre and film sound design, live sound art and installations. Her research spans ethnomusicology, spatial acoustics, bio-music and cartographical sonic epistemology. Her work has been presented at National Gallery Singapore, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Singapore, Venice Biennale, Singapore Biennale, Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, UNSSC, Turin, ZHdK, Zurich and SFMOMA. Residencies include NTU CCA, Borderlands Residency at Ludwig Forum, Aachen and the National Arts Council Singapore–Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin) collaboration.