| TANAH AYER: Malaysian Stories from the Land |
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TANAH AYER: Malaysian Stories from the Land artist talk: Participating Artists: Malaysia is a country filled with contradictions. The contemporary moment is a repetitive cycle of sensational politics and blind economic progress that leaves the population in a constant state of exasperation. Often the past, fondly remembered for being more optimistic and progressive, seems like a foreign country when compared to the present. Current government schemes for modernity ignore local needs of belonging and continuity. Expanding oil palm plantations corrupt bio-diversity, blind cultural restoration erases the intimacy of local history, highways segregate and prevent urban cohesion and needless shopping malls monopolise public spaces destroying heritage sites in the process. Increasing Islamic conservatism propagated by racially divisive government politics has led to much anxiety, compelling many Malaysians to yearn for not only a return to the past, but the pragmatic reinvention of its halcyon days to serve the needs of the now and the future. Dividing the exhibition into three sections - Poetics/Puitis, Traffic/Trafik, and Entropy/Entropi - Tanah Ayer constructs a textured narrative by considering the abstract affinities between the artists and the land, the movement of people across geography, as well as a critique on the destructive dimensions of the Malaysian dream, respectively. By interrogating the symbolic and aesthetic values of space as well as individual attachment to place and identity, the show presents complex artistic responses to politics, economic progress and shifting cultural values of race, religion and class. Eva McGovern
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