by Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
Work comes online 22 January 2021
Presenting at If Forest Talks is the first iteration of a broader body of work titled, <earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>. A collaborative research project looking into environmental histories, infrastructures overlaid on spirit paths, extractive capitalist urbanization, archival fragments, moving, shapeshifting walking paths through human built landscapes alongside what lies below and above these trails and coordinates.
Consisting of a series of earth drawings and a video in three parts: Whispering Secrets into Trees, The Poetics of Moving Earth and Terra as Palimpsest. Together they offer multiple entry points and traversing pathways through the work. Serving as invitations and invocations to see with skin, hear with our feet, feel our way through spatial interruptions and somatically attend to sound at points of transit, change and threshold-crossing.
How are we listening to each other, to our surroundings, our environments, our bodies, our breath, our organs, to creaturely companions, to reconfigured rhythms of time and disembodied sounds from virtual realms? How are we unlearning and re-negotiating our relationship to time, to routines, to spatiality, presence and sentience in space? What invocatory technologies of the present are lending themselves to these new planetary questions and shapeshifting worlds we are building, sensing and mapping?
Each cumulative form of this long-term project is an invitation to reframe hegemonic cartographies, to conjure the ecologies of selves within the seen and unseen, and make memory maps from meandering through the homely and strange, the uninhabitable, the chthonic, the otherworlds and more than human worlds that we share habits and habitats with.
ZARINA MUHAMMAD
Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound and moving image, she is interested in the broader contexts of myth-making, haunted historiographies, multi-species entanglements, land as palimpsest and role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends multiple voices to spectral matters and speculative histories. She has been working on a long-term interdisciplinary project on Southeast Asia’s provisional relationship to the otherworldly, ritual magic and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity and the social production of rationality.
In addition to presenting recent incarnations of her projects, performances and installations at Singapore Art Museum, ArtScience Museum, NTU Centre of Contemporary Art, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Indonesia Contemporary Art Network, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, she has also presented her work and been involved in projects across Asia Pacific and Europe.
ZACHARY CHAN
Zachary Chan is a graphic designer by profession. He is the co-founder of design collective, crop.sg.
He is also an occasional composer, sound designer and an amateur musician, participating in Javanese and Balinese Gamelan ensembles. As a musician, notable performances and collaborations include “Continuum” (2015-16) with the Observatory, “Vinayaka” (2016) with Bhaskar’s Arts Academy, “Gema Karawitan Nusantara” RRI Semarang (2016), “Pragmatic Prayers for the Kala at the Threshold” with Zarina Muhammad, “Pokoknya” (2020) with Tini Aliman, and “JOGJAKARFEST” (2020) with Singa Nglaras.
As a composer, he puts out new work on a semi-regular basis, most recently at the first International Gamelan Festival (2018) held in Solo, and the Singapore Night Festival (2019).
