[COMMA] Corrida (Race)

On Corrida and Rubber

In this artist sharing, Bart Seng unpacks the research and making of Corrida (Race), tracing the research threads that underpin the performance. The session moves across the economic and colonial histories of natural rubber, Singapore’s plantation past, the narrative and ritual structure of Spanish bullfighting, and ancient Mesoamerican relationships with rubber.

The sharing also includes screenings of related short video works from Bart’s ongoing project, Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime, situating Corrida (Race) within a wider investigation into rubber as material, commodity, historical force and cultural imaginary.

Bart is an artist whose practice spans the moving image, the photographic, performance, curation and expanded cinema. Working through autofictional role-playing, S&M poetics, fetish theories and experimental storytelling strategies, he stages encounters between reality and fantasy to trace how desire is shaped by history, institutions, political economy and material conditions, and how it may in turn unsettle the orders that produce it.

Hothouse is a space in Singapore that supports and prototypes artistic practices. It nurtures experimentation and production as a mode of upending conventions and liberating inquiry. Founded in 2020, it is housed within space and time shared among the art collective INTER–MISSION, the design agency Currency, and the research lab formAxioms.

This ever-evolving interdisciplinary setup encompasses expertise across contemporary art, technology, design, and architecture, allowing for emancipatory approaches toward art practice, knowledge building and dissemination.