'Heat on the Mind'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- G3 (Main Building)
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
This panel explores the intersection of two, usually siloed, global crises: climate and mental health, around the connecting thread of heat.
Unpredictable variations in climate, such as rising temperatures or sea levels, are impacting mental wellbeing, reshaping ideas of personhood, and ecological relationships.
For both anthropologists and artists, conceptualisations of heat and the body-mind are not new. Heat can be illusive, overly present or absent, intimately bridging the somatic and the psychic. The affective experience of heat is relational and historical. Meanings and understandings of heat often have colonial legacies. Extractivist logics come together with heating and cooling; and their siblings, like 'humidity', closely linked to imperialist ideas of the tropics, itself a contested term.
How might we continue to think about heat, distress and wellbeing in creative ways?
About the speakers
The panel brings together scholars and artists offering a novel perspective, using globally diverse understandings of heat as a connecting theme.
Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and exhibitions.
Jiat Hwee Chang is Associate professor at the National University Singapore. He is an architectural historian who has worked on heat and the social consequences of cooling technologies for decades; critically examining colonial tangents of heat, cooling and ideas of “the tropics”. Most recently he has developed the theme of “thermal governance”.
Nikita Simpson is a Reader in Anthropology, and the Co-director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA). She researches and provides policy advisory on mental health, care, and inequality.
Sriwhana Spong is London-based artist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She holds a doctorate in fine art. Her recent work Vague Dog (2024) was commissioned by the 2024 Busan Biennale. It is filmed using a thermal-imaging camera which tracks the body heat of two pet dogs overlaid with the recitation of a 16th century court case, which decided for the first time that a dog could be judged a “thing” of value, just as long as it showed proof of its master’s training. The work brings together an instrument designed for military purposes – used for precision navigation, surveillance – with poetry, energetic and sensory knowledge.
Nora Wuttke holds an architecture degree from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She went on to complete an MA in Social Anthropology of Development at SOAS in 2010. In 2024 she received her PhD in Social Anthropology at SOAS.
CAMHRArts
Within our newly created, UKRI funded, Center for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA), we are initiating a program of events and activities focused on mental health and the contemporary Arts (CAMHRArts). Rather than approaching mental health and illness solely in medical terms, CAMHRArts will aim to generate and host work that draws on a range of knowledge systems, forms of practice, and concepts of vitality and distress expressed through artistic media.
Image: CAMHRA
