Curatorial Text for Inessa Kalabekova’s “Hidden in the Jungle” show at Fullerton
I have written the curatorial text for the exhibition, Hidden in the Jungle, from 6 January to 6 February 2026, by artist Inessa Kalabekova at Fullerton Hotel.
I had the pleasure of following the evolution of Kalabekova’s work for many years now, visiting her studio in Singapore and contributing curatorial texts to her shows
Below is my curatorial text called “Restoring the Ancestral“
In our contemporary megacities, is there still space for imagination? In places where everything is regulated, circumscribed, sanitised, is there still space for the sacred to emerge from nature?
One thing is for sure: urban life has increasingly detached human experience from direct, sustained contact with natural elements. Our daily encounters with vegetation are often reduced to the few plants on our balcony, while water flows from our faucets with very little effort on our part. In this scenario, nature then becomes nothing but an episodic encounter, one that happens only in designated public zones such as parks, curated gardens, and recreational reserves, rather than an inevitable everyday structure through which people move and orient themselves.
Our relationship with animals also shifts; the animals we encounter are the neighbourhood dogs and the occasional stray cat. From coexisting presences within shared ecosystems, animals become symbolic figures deployed across culture, design and even branding. In contemporary society, animals went from being our biological neighbours to meaning-carriers.
In this context, which is increasingly present globally, Singapore in the specifics, represents an intensified version of this situation, having undergone decades of landscape engineering under the model of the “garden city,” where ecological appearance is systematically designed, maintained, and regulated through state planning, architectural control, and technological intervention. This has produced a city where organic growth is never autonomous and where environments that appear lush and abundant are in fact the result of sustained infrastructural effort.
Shall we be surprised that some artists in Singapore decide to take upon themselves the task of resuscitating the residual, submerged, or partially obscured ancestral layers of memory and spirit? In their work, they reveal how natural impulses and non-rational systems persist within highly rationalised contexts. In the Lion City, culture and art operate as the primary mechanisms through which a memory of the sacred in nature can be accessed.
Inessa Kalabekova is precisely one of those artists who is set to restore forgotten mythologies and make apparent the sacred in all things. Kazakh-born, having lived in Singapore for many years, she positions her practice within this terrain, developing over the years a body of work that consistently frees up the energies that lie underneath highly controlled urban environments. She has done so through a practice that symbolically draws from the cultures of both East and West, all associated with a strong base of research.
Her new show “Hidden in the Jungle” puts into images some presences which never stopped being active within psychological, cultural, and imaginative domains, whose role is to provide a navigation of sorts through times of uncertainty, danger, and transformation. She presents figures that operate as guides, guardians, and mediators, which in many Asian folk traditions manifest as animal spirits.
In the show, the constellation of mythological animal figures expands to include the griffin, the phoenix, Foo Dog–Lion, Garuda, Tiger, Qilin, Baku, Naga, Hamsa, Genbu, and Sarimanok. Instead of collecting these figures for a bestiary, something that would be reminiscent of medieval times, the artist seems more interested in using each figure as a pictogram to build her own vocabulary of symbols, to share it with us viewers. In its half-human, half-beast configuration, each creature reconciles within itself concepts of resilience and protection, of continuity, memory, and endurance. Each animal carries its own embedded cultural logic and visual grammar, which can then be read by the individual sensitivity of the spectator. It’s interesting in this sense to see how the artist uses the technique of collage, which, on a formal level, already demonstrates an overlapping of pieces from different universes in a harmonious coexistence.
Indeed, for the artist, the collages of “Hidden in the Jungle“ are an extension of a trajectory of inquiry that began in earlier academic research. During both her Master’s programme and her PhD research, Kalabekova developed a method that involves sustained visits to specific locations, temples, and museums, allowing direct observation to become a component of artistic production. All this information would later be digested and materialise across collage, drawing, performance and installation.
Kalabekova‘s engagement with Asian mythological forms in the past few years prompted a parallel examination of the richness of her own cultural background. She found herself reflecting on how her moving across countries and cultures shaped her inner symbolic vocabulary and her personal mythologies. In the quest of her own archetypes, the artist found them in the most diverse forms across different geographies, and, through them, she “rewilds” and “re-ancestralises” the Singaporean reality she inhabits.
“I left Kazakhstan at 25, and apart from Grimm and Perrault, I grew up with very little access to my own mythological heritage,” she recounts. “But during my Master’s research on the griffin, I discovered that its origins lead back to the Altai Mountains, the place where I was born.”
“This brought me to the legend of the Altai Princess, preserved in ice and covered in griffin tattoos. Realising this connection felt profound. So rather than keeping the myths separate, I found that they overlapped, meeting through landscape, memory, and origin. My work now moves between these worlds, letting the stories speak to each other.”
Her background informs this approach. The artist was, in fact, trained academically across visual art, music, dance, and architecture, and from there she developed a synesthetic, integrated method through which sound, movement, and image remain structurally interlinked.
For Kalabekova, the necessity of working with myth is grounded in how knowledge has traditionally been transmitted across cultures: “In ancient times, knowledge was not always passed directly from giver to receiver; it often moved through a medium, a figure, an animal, a spirit, or a ritual object that held greater significance and respect. Myths remind us of this indirect, symbolic way of learning, where wisdom arrives through images, gestures, and stories rather than instruction.”
We can confidently say that “Hidden in the Jungle” represents a consolidation of directions previously developed, some of which focused on the systematic exploration of Singapore’s parks, reserves, and cultivated green environments through the combined mediums of painting and collage.
For “Hidden in the Jungle”, her process stays the same: she always begins with structural decisions that define the internal architecture of each piece, while sketchbooks function as research instruments filled with visual studies, overheard texts, fragmentary ideas, remembered images, and spontaneous conceptual material.
Technically, her collages are constructed through successive layers of cut paper that are mounted, removed, and reassembled. The artist repeatedly returns to original sketches throughout the process, allowing the work to evolve through successive testing. The deliberate tension between warm and cool tonal ranges to create spatial vibration and movement and seamlessly dialogues with painters such as Chagall, John Singer Sargent, Rembrandt, William Morris and more. Hints to these artists can be almost always found hidden somewhere in the collages.
This constant tension between the visible and the hidden animates “Hidden in the Jungle,” as the artist keeps embedding wallpaper fragments, postcards, musical scores, maps, and even museum tickets into the structure of the paintings, using these materials as latent layers that remain partially concealed and are only gradually perceived through sustained viewing. That’s why Kalabekova’s work, while resulting immediately powerful at a distracted glance, is really made to live with and be unfolded in time.
Somehow, besides the aspect of representation, in the way her works are conceived, they address the faults within the mechanisms that sustain contemporary existence. Viewers found themselves asking if they should keep operating through systems of transaction, speed, and optimisation, or consider a mode of living more geared towards curiosity, attention, intimacy, and narrative density.
Formally this new chapter of Kalabekova’s production, demonstrates a shift toward increased force, density, and dynamism in the treatment of figures, which can be traced to a prolonged period of reflection and self-analysis undertaken during her Master’s programme, during which she produced nearly two hundred written reflections examining her own practice in writing.
“Writing is painful for me, but it forced me to articulate what I was really doing and why,” she says. “So the change you see is not entirely spontaneous; it grew from this long process of thinking, questioning, and understanding my own artistic language.”
The artist confesses to being in a very sensitive and imaginative place in her practice right now: “I was thinking about play, about the tropics, and about how stories or creatures can feel both visible and concealed at the same time. The jungle becomes a metaphor for imagination itself, dense, layered, and full of things waiting to be discovered if you look closely.”
