In America the use of blackface is cringe-worthy and condemned. In Malaysia it pops up everywhere…but what does it mean?

by Simon Soon

A visit to Galeri Petronas’s Changing Phases: Relative Spaces proves to be a disappointing encounter with a bland and politically correct account of modern Malaysia. They have failed history.

by Zedeck Siew

Obituary: Yasmin Ahmad, 1958 – 2009

The dreamer, her films I didn’t like, and why we will miss her.

by Zedeck Siew

On 4 June – or was it 3 June? – two gentlemen walked into Valentine Willie Fine Art KL. Their target: Fahmi Reza’s Najib’s Head Stolen From Billboard.

Fahmi’s Najib was behind yellow police tape. “So, basically it means that our PM is behind a crime scene, is it?”

by Bilqis Hijjas

On the way to see director Loh Kok Man’s new version of his work now entitled Toilet, I was expecting lots of grit and grime, blood and guts all over the walls, grotesquerie and grimness. What I found was altogether different: light polished vignettes, all scrubbed and disinfected. And while I enjoyed the production in the end, I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing.

by Chi Too

There’s nothing like directing your first French film, which is the epitome of “serious” art house filmmaking. Produced specially for ARTERI, Chi Too’s Regardant La Peinture Secher (Watching Paint Dry) is humourously dedicated to the love of paint.

by ARTERI

Announcement: The Box of Ideas is packaged and priced as a cigarette box. But instead of 20 nicotine fixes, you get 100 ideas from artists, activists and other agent provocateurs. It will be promoted via luscious cigarette girls+boys embedded in social events throughout Kuala Lumpur from 27 June 2009.

Submit your ideas!

by Simon Soon

The Voyage To The Ends Of The World is an internalisation of the mythical heroic journey (think Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth), using the photographic medium to convey the emotional weight associated with an abstract passage towards self discovery.

by Sau Bin

Art practitioners are purveyors of meanings, through their artwork providing a link to apprehend the self and the society, produced and consumed for both themselves and the society, nothing more nothing less.

By Eva McGovern

I would like to take the opportunity to use my inaugural contribution to contribute an editorial of sorts since I have very kindly been accepted as contributing editor for Arteri. This entry therefore is about a question. A question I have been trying to understand so I can posit it in a more sophisticated way.