Inessa Kalabekova, The Quiet Watcher in the Branches, 2025
Hidden in the Jungle grows out of Inessa Kalabekova’s ongoing PhD research and explores how myth, ritual objects, and embodied practices carry cultural memory. Developed through fieldwork in temples, museums, and cultivated landscapes, the works translate observation, drawing, and site-responsive presence into layered collage and painting.
The exhibition brings together mythological animal figures—dragons, phoenixes, Garuda, Sarimanok, Naga, Foo Dog–Lion, and Hamsa—treated as pictograms through which the artist develops her own visual language. Shaped by migration, research, and lived encounters with place, these creatures act as mediators of protection, transformation, and belonging. Playful yet contemplative, the jungle becomes a metaphor for imagination itself: layered, alive, and revealed through close attention.
Born in Kazakhstan and based in Singapore for the past two decades, Inessa Kalabekova is a multidisciplinary artist working across visual art, performance, and storytelling. Trained in visual art, music, dance, and architecture, she brings a synesthetic approach to her practice, translating rhythm and movement into visual form.
Educated under the Russian academic model and later at Central Saint Martins (MFA, UAL), she is currently pursuing a PhD in Fine Arts at Universiti Sains Malaysia. Her work — rooted in travel and cultural exchange — unfolds as a personal Silk Road, where Kazakh heritage intertwines with global mythologies.
Venue: The Fullerton Hotel Singapore, East Garden Foyer Gallery, 1 Fullerton Square, Singapore 049178, Singapore 238469
When: 6 Jan - 6 Feb 2026, 8am - 8pm
By: Fullerton Hotel Singapore (The Fullerton Heritage)
