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 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. Forthcoming iterations of this work will be examining environmental histories, territory as palimpsest, land expropriation, therianthropy and multi-species entanglements.

In addition to presenting recent incarnations of her projects, performances and installations at Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), NTU Centre of Contemporary Art (Singapore), Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film (Singapore), T-Works (Singapore), Indonesia Contemporary Art Network (Indonesia), Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (Taiwan,) she has also presented her work and been involved in projects across Asia Pacific and Europe.

Through this project, Zarina intends to revisit various mythic narratives and belief systems connected with site specific spectral forms, trees older than our buildings, stories on territory, terror, time, therianthropy, detritus and talismans, guardians at our thresholds alongside disembodied historical imprints that haunt our archipelagic imagination.