NAZERUL
KHAIRY BEN-DZULKEFLIKENDURI
EXHIBITION
Presented as a final participatory dinner party. The project was part of an individually assigned task: to research a number local and international artists and researchers whose practice resonated with one’s nascent art career.
The following script is a product of researching them and thinking about the conversations that they would have should one invite them for dinner.
My peers channelled the invited artists and researchers before an altar with their images and food effigies.
Script:
Nazerul Ben-Dzulkefli
Guests:
Gabriel Chaile (Argentine Ceramicist)
Simone Fattal (Lebanese Ceramicist)
Mike Bianco (WA Artist)
Zarina Muhammad (International Artist & Curator)
Terence Heng (Visual Sociologist, Uni Liverpool)
Catherine Bell (Ritual Studies Scholar)
ACT 1
The temporary altar is set in a void deck of a Housing Development Board apartment – an empty space on the ground floor which is often rented for Chinese funeral wakes, lavish Malay weddings and community thanksgiving prayers, and in recent years, for the celebration of birthdays of the migrant Filipino community.
A sacred space is created through a transient performative ritual altar in a mundane everyday space with everyday objects, biscuits from Nazerul’s childhood and some effigies of the guests whose spirits he conjured.
Bell:
Funny that I should be summoned to a ritual feast after spending half my life researching and lecturing about rituals. I can’t say I know who this person who dragged me here is.
Zarina:
That’s Naz, our host. He’s been told that his art making processes are solely based on his running around inside his own head and that he makes no consideration for other establish practitioners. But I beg to differ, I met him in September, and he spoke a lot about how your theories – albeit one or two lines – from your magnum opus have guided him in his thinking process. That, coupled with my research interest in vernacular histories, spirit ecology through an animist framework with which he hopes to shake up Perth’s art scene with.
Bell:
He’d probably only read a few chapters of my book, it’s a very difficult text for someone who is not a major in world religions, but I applaud him for trying.
Terence:
He also thought that he could use some good citations for his papers. I’ve also read some of your papers Catherine. I’m Terence by the way, currently the world authority in transient diasporic Chinese rituals and you’re currently stuck in one thanks to our host.
Mike:
Oh, we have been summoned? Why am I dragged here without my consent? I feel like an exploited lower lifeform tossed around by a human. Oh, who am I to judge? I make people lay down on a bed with glass tubes of live bees. Live bees – no consent given by the bees. I’m sure they had better places to be than in glass tubes in PICA.
Gabriel:
Yes, I wonder where is the making in your practise, Mike. Ah, Zarina too. No, Zarina especially your overuse of found objects, community engagement,and cultural artefacts for your installations is just baffling. For Simone and me, it’s clear we make art objects, we work with traditional mediums to make contemporary forms informed by and embody ancient mysteries, your work however, remains a mystery.
Terence:
In her defence - if I may speak for Singapore’s award-winning artist – Zarina and I, both are interested in the changing meanings of sidelined cultural practises, biographies of objects and how things inherited contains within them the narratives of micro-histories of people who used to own them. Every object displayed in an installation, or in my case, photographically documented is a piece of history that have been sieved out of the national identity making in the case of Singapore, in favour of homogenous, standard and acceptable cultural narrative. That is our making process.
Catherine:
Do you mean unscholarly accounts of vernacular history? I am totally on board. I understand the importance of gathering oral histories and various culture’s interconnectedness with the physical world and the spirit world. Our actions in communal ritual reflects the aspirations we have in the spirit world. Very much like this, this, I’m sure this is a Hungry Ghost Festival makeshift altar, considering I’m already dead. Our host’s aspiration to learn
from our collective expertise summed up in a ritual feast.
Terence:
I agree, traditional western academic scholarship (which has been heavily influenced by medieval Islamic scholarship but never mind that for now) isn’t the only way to ensure that one’s art practise is substantial. My research was entirely conducted through the documentation of the exhumation of cemeteries, I took photos, I mingled with the families, I wrote new narratives to create a novel understanding of the lives of diasporic communities and how they circumnavigate state sanctioned parameters on religious use of public spaces, and, imagine how diasporas would continue after death with exhumation, reinternment, repatriation of remains and retelling of histories.
Zarina:
My works are rooted in the retelling and dissection of oral histories, myths and cultural tropes, symbolisms and visual fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago. Traditional scholarship limits our understanding of the cosmos through a rigid empirical framework and worldview. My practise considers the fantastical when dealing with the physical world – how does our understanding of the world filled with demigods and spirits can potentially create better outcomes for our management of the environment, sacred sites and marginalized sections of our communities.
Gabriel:
Ah, mystery solved. Understanding the past isn’t just the role of historians but also, that of individuals like us who have a platform from where our views can be aired through art.
Mike:
Back to the environment, I think we need a better way to engage with and care for the environment and communities, human or otherwise, that benefit from it. I myself gathered participants in Perth to learn the history of native and alien plant species in the city. The participants to the project roamed the city marking trees on the map and collecting data through active participation and walking the grounds.
Simone:
Yes, but is it art or merely a well-funded circus act? What I found to be interesting was your attempt at recreating lost histories with the help of a quack clairvoyant back in America. The whole thing is undoubtedly a sham but that was a rather novel and creative qualitative research method that I think piqued our host’s interest.
Mike:
I am respectfully ignoring the first bit of what you said Simone. Yes, piecing together stories that are lost to time and decay through speculative means is a common technique in creating a more comprehensive understanding of the past and with that, we hope, the future.
Gabriel:
Community arts, ground-up initiatives and speculative narratives, I get it now. You see my giant oven-like objects, they too embody my desire in recollecting ancestral history and knowledge, what better way to get people together than with food? Around food, people begin to talk, plans are made, futures imagined and speaking of which, I can’t seem to pick this food up.
Simone:
I’ve been wondering the same. I thought it’s just the arthritis.
Catherine:
You’re not actually here. Just… just look at the food, my dear disembodied spirit friends. Wait till you join me in the afterlife.
Simone:
Piecing together… well I hate to admit it but yes, my use of Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern mythology is based on academic stitching-together the various piece meal information archaeologists and historians uncover from cuneiform tablets. Clay tablets, although well preserved, usually breaks off when the story gets exciting. That’s where historians and artists like me, fill up the gaps with our imagination. I like to do that through shaping clay into personifications of ideas and experiences. I think I’m going to make a sculpture of this meet-up when I get home.
Terence:
Actually, I’d really love to document this meeting, I’m a visual sociologist after all, let me get my camera.
Gabriel:
Oh yes, we should take a photo together, no?
The group huddled together for a photo infront of the altar. A polaroid film falls onto the
ground revealing nothing but an image of the altar covered with food, still untouched.
