Goings-on is our new weekly newsletter to be updated on Sunday/Monday letting our readers in on art events around town or abroad in the coming week. -ED.

Instant Cafe’s 1999 production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist. The cast featured Huzir Sulaiman, Patrick Teoh, Zaibo, Zahim Albakri, Ida Nerina, Hashim Nor & Lee Swee Keong. Directed by Jo Kukathas.

The week leading up to Raya sees KL putting on our holiday breaks as we gear towards the festive season this coming weekend. There’s nothing like a major public holiday in KL, those of us left behind from the back-to-Kampung rush have the streets all to ourselves. When the majority of the population is flushed out of the city, we get this surreal tableaux of an abandoned metropolis. Empty streets, rolled down shutters, absence of trade and the humdrum.

Before we get to that point, here’s the week’s short update on the goings on around town.

We have two choices on how we would like to celebrate the eve of Malaysia day. First up is a staged reading of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist over at CHAI with a cast of Jo Kukathas, Amerul Affendi, Fish and Renee McIntosh, in a timely story about a political activist falling to his death while being questioned by authorities.

Over at the Annexe gallery, Drawn to Malaysia invites two visiting artists/academics on traditional performance for an evening of discussion with local art practitioners. During the event, Wendy Rogers will share some of her recent work on DVD, and Matthew Cohen’s students from University of Malay will perform a demonstration of wayang kulit.

Gan Tee Sheng’s painting for Blank Page at Wei-ling Gallery

Two exhibitions open on Malaysia Day which falls on 16 September each year. Lori-Ann Bellissimo’s Wild Cards at Yelocentric is new series of circular abstract paintings that explore the paradox of spatial depth on a flat surface, allowing the shifting of colour and form within the painting to conjure a landscape of emotions. Meanwhile, Wei-ling Gallery features the creative versatility of four upstarts of the artworld – Gan Tee Sheng, Chong Ai Lei, Dhavinder Singh, Annabelle Ng – in Blank Page.

For those of us who missed last week’s openings of VWFA’s trio suite, Phuan Thai Meng’s long-awaited second solo exhibition, Made in Malaysia, is currently on view at Valentine Willie Fine Art main gallery, showing alongside Felix Bacolor’s Never-never Land in the Project Room. While Chong Kim Chiew’s depiction of fragmented maps of Malaysia on paper, Magnitude, hangs at 67, Tempinis Satu.

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(SS)

Raya greetings