24/05/2026
An aporia is a philosophical impasse, like a problem with no way out. A question that, in being posed, already undoes its own possible answers.
Hotel Aporia - the exhibition by Ho Tzu Nyen now in Gallery 4 at - is a video installation that makes the walls breathe. Originally commissioned for 2019, it was built into the two floors of Kirakutei, a Taisho-era inn where kamikaze pilots spent their last nights before their final flights. That building is the ghost that still inhabits this work wherever it goes, including here in Doha.
Kamikaze pilots whose sacrifice was a tactic for national victory, the philosophers of the Kyoto School whose complicity with imperialism sits in permanent, unresolved tension with their Zen and Buddhist thought, and names like Ozu Yasujiro and Yokoyama Ryuichi, both stationed in Southeast Asia as part of the Imperial Army’s propaganda units - these figures share a hotel, a historical moment, and an ideology they may or may not have chosen. The tension is what drew me closer to the work.
And then there’s the aesthetic part, drawing in too: faces are blurred, shots resembling the interiors of the original inn, layers of voices narrating letters, past and present, punctuated by sound rumblings that physically rattle the space.
What does it mean to encounter this work in Doha in 2026, at a fire station built in 1982, now repurposed as a contemporary art centre under the direction of himself an accomplished filmmaker who has spent his career staging history as performance?
There’s an interesting grounding here: the Doha context refracts this work differently but equally poignantly, as it sits alongside the whole Gulf’s relationship to militarised ideology and written/unwritten histories - without spelling it out loudly. The site-haunting doesn’t disappear: it multiplies. And that, I think, is for the good. An exhibition to remember.
.
