Shaifuddin Mamat aka Poodien’s latest commission for Pustaka Kiri, a portrait mural of historical revolutionaries, was unveiled last weekend in conjunction with the launch of the new mini library in industrial Balakong. Initated by the Parti Socialis Malaysia (PSM), the resource centre will house books, journals and magazines that feature writings from major left-leaning thinkers (from Karl Marx to Ho Chi Minh, from Che Guevara to Boestaman) that have informed the struggle that has continued to be undertaken by the Malaysian left today.

While Poodien’s mural paint a collective picture of those who have contributed to the history of the left, this comes in the form of a localised vision of this history where Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin are evoked alongside local and regional notables such as Tan Malaka, Shamsiah Fakeh, Ahmad Boestamam, P Veerasenan, S Ganapath.

Curated by Sevan Doraisamy, the exhibition note which exhorts, ‘SOCIALISM IS BACK TO CLAIM ITS GLORIOUS PAST’, succeeds in describing the mural only to a certain extent, for it is not entirely accurate to say that the mural is a blind evocation of the past. Poodien’s mural seems to write history for the future and address this through a number of contemporary styles ranging from graffiti stencil, drip painting, as well as choice of lurid colours that imbue the portraits with an element of Pop.

This dissonance of styles clashes within a single space, a montage that seeks to collapse the past and the present so as to suggest that the potency and relevance of the left as a struggle, as art, as practice and as life are not marked by a return to history, to its origin. Instead we look to its accumulation through time as theory refined and redefined with each successive generation take on the mantle of socialism. Just as these iconic images evoke ideas, they too embody actions. The red history is also at times a bloody history.

(SS)

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