'Follow the Road', 2008, Charcoal on paper collage and digital print, 75 x 120 cm, Image Courtesy of VWFA, KL

This is the unedited version of an article first published in Off the Edge Magazine, October 2008, Issue 46. Many thanks goes to OTE for granting Arteri permission to reprint.

Nadiah Bamadhaj: Surveillance

Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, 16-30 August 2008

How aware are we of the influences of State urban planning on the creation of identity? Like it or not the positioning of infrastructure – housing, hospitals, schools, transport and government networks all inform individual and public consciousness. Where we live, where children go to school, where we shop and who we do all of this with is a carefully crafted construct designed by public and private individuals. Nadiah Bamadhaj has created a platform of investigation and resistance around this very concept in her solo exhibition at Valentine Willie Fine Art that represents an ongoing body of drawing based works as part of the artist’s PhD research at Curtin University, Perth. Bamadhaj proposes, that not only does architecture and urban planning influence who we are but is an effective strategy of control and maintenance of state power. For her exhibition she has chosen, two out of the three sites from her research : formulaic suburban terrace housing in and around Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: the government’s administrative hub 40km outside of the city (the last site being the PLUS Expressway).

Bamadhaj’s practice has explored the politicised and highly emotive facets of identity construction. It is also part of a personal journey which reflects the artist’s own cultural hybridity of multicultural mixed heritage, gender positioning and personal politic. Throughout her body of work, the viewer sees a carefully considered and intellectual production that is philosophical and confrontational through use of multiple mediums such as drawing, installation, sculpture and photography. Characteristically the artist selects geographical regions and or architectural sites (both within Malaysia and Southeast Asia as well as internationally) that are saturated with historical significance. She creates images and video installation, with additional elements incorporated such as text and digital manipulation, that invade, reclaim and invite new questioning around ideas of the colonial, post colonial and national identity propagated by history and or government ideology.

Surveillance looks at the central tenant of her PhD thesis entitled ‘Creating Critical Perspectives of Normalised Spaces in Malaysia’ in which she hypothesises that ‘certain built environments in Malaysia contribute to the classification of the population into specific groups, which correlate with communal and authoritative formations of government. These classifications are embraced as personal identities which can be further understood as ‘national identities’. Surveillance therefore in this context embodies the notion that this act of government control allows for constant observation through a grand plan of coercion on an unconscious populace. Bamadhaj’s new drawings, all created in 2008, firstly act as an acknowledgement to this otherwise unseen ploy and secondly as a method of provocation and resistance to it.

The exhibition displays work that is a mixture of distant academic observation, emotive commentary and artistic experimentation. The images themselves are compositionally constructed with the inclusion of a single human subject that in varying degrees are in relation to an imposed aerial landscape in acts of submission, questioning and rejection. Created on paper, surface layers are cut into, stripped away and built up. Charcoal is meticulously applied with the aid of Q-tips to create a multi layered 2 dimensional relief. Human models were selected to convey specific emotions and embody the nameless demographics affected by this hypothesis of ‘normalised’ state control. Architectural plans and road maps digitally printed onto clear plastic are then layered over some of the subjects who are portrayed as busts, fragmented and dominated by these generic plans of suburban or transport structures. They are at time helpless, unaware and apathetic to their own manipulation whilst concurrently highlighting that within these homogenising architectural constructs lie individuals with their own personal histories.

However, it is the artist’s use of her own image that dominate the exhibition. Although not titled self portraits Taman Impian Jaya, Landlocked and The Island seem to show different moments in Bhamadaj’s thought processes around her chosen topic of research. Taman Impian Jaya sees her facial features absorbed in the aerial landscape; eyes closed, the female subject seems impassive or defeated. A type of Mother Earth figure that has been stripped of her powers, or lulled into a deep sleep by dominating public forces and representative of the first stage of unawareness and passive consumption of this state strategy. Landlocked the most visually arresting of the three is the second stage, where the artist is aware of this manipulation and is attempting to break free from the regime. She is not quite fully liberated though, the topographical landscape is still embedded or tattooed onto her unclothed monumental body, but her reactionary glare and wearing of the songkok is a bold and destabilising challenge to her opposition. Here is where the objective academic artist researcher inserts herself into the narrative, an advocate against this type of political surveillance and attempts to herself becomes the surveyor. She knows Big Brother is watching and she is looking straight back. The inclusion of the songkok, the most recognisable signifier of Malay male identity, is a blatant act of defiance, recontextualised to become a controversial tool for response by the artist to social and gender constructs. And finally The Island shows Bamadhaj rejecting this landscape of manipulation, she turns her back in profile, once again wearing the songkok to create her own path and is in full control of her destiny. However, is it the other way around? Is it possible that the landscape is rejecting her?

Only able to clarify her PhD theory in greater detail once she had left Malaysia to live in Indonesia, Bamadhaj’s multiple heritage and positioning as a woman creates another layer of identity questioning and frustration. Her continued strategy of challenging cultural stereotypes creates work that echoes her own personal isolation as well as that of ordinary citizens. These three images not only destabilise the viewer but seem to create a tension within the show itself demonstrating that although this body of work is part of academic research the artistic process is a highly personal and subjective approach. The detached atmosphere that is evident in the remaining drawings seem more like carefully edited excerpts from her thesis, whereas the works which include her own image are like personal notes, poetically rendered and highly personal.

Surveillance represents an impressive mobilisation and evolution of Bamadhaj’s epistemological approach to art making. Previously her subverted monuments to colonialisation such as 147 Tahun Merdeka – where familiar local landscapes were projected into the future but with very different meanings– were uninhabited landscapes of dystopian futures or saturations of conflicted pasts with and inferred human presence. Now citizen, artist and architecture have literally been fused together to created both monumental portraiture and anthropomorphised architectural landscapes that are contested sites of resistance and homogenisation.

Poet John Donne famously wrote, ‘No Man is an Island, entire of itself’ meaning that human beings are always affected/connected and influenced by one another in some way. However, Nadiah Bamadhaj’s recent work highlights that only as an individual can we understand how the masses are being coerced to thrive in specific and controlled environments in order to propagate specifically designed social hierarchies. Through a compelling combination of academic rigour and criticality Bamadhaj creates work that is not only convincing in its argument but also fused with personal concerns and multiple meaning. This enables her audience to question with new eyes the built environment as an active site of control that guides us through our public and professional lives and influences who we are on individual and national levels.

(EM)