Details
CollectionSouth & Southeast Asian Collection
Object numberS2023-0001-001-0
TitleP♥rtraire Familiya (featuring rawanXberdenyut, Aleezon, Tuan Siami, A.I.den and Lé Luhur from NUS Museum's South and Southeast Asia Collection and Autaspace)
CreatorFyerool Darma
DescriptionElusive and kaleidoscopic, Fyerool Darma’s P♥rtraire Familiya (2023) calls for the introspection of the processes behind construction and preservation. Darma mobilizes this discussion through cut-and-paste motions reminiscent of remixing and sampling. With glitches and distortions forming the central theme of the installation, the artist reflects on the interplay between materiality and the digital realm.
The first component of the installation is its wallpaper. As a visual soundscape, an enhanced image of a sarong from the textile collection of the Museum wraps the walls of the installation. The vibrant, checkered print of the traditional garment is repeated across the expanse of this surface. Fluorescent pinks and purples combine retrofuturism and tradition; the wallpaper’s plaid pattern alludes to the folkloric design of the garment. Constructed with polyvinyl chloride, the synthetic element of the sarong’s image encounters and harks to the original cotton material of the artifact. Overlaying the wallpaper, in placements guided by intuition, Darma introduces glitches to this arrangement. This is done as he puts into action the ‘remixing’ that is consistent throughout the exhibition: Darma cuts sections of the wallpaper and pastes it at random to add disruptions to the sarong’s uniform pattern.
From here, similar distortions reappear in the eleven frames of carbon fiber mounted on the wallpaper. Six of these pieces are arranged in monotone high on the exhibition walls. The remaining five portraits that follow in succession, however, are mounted at eye-level in a disorderly fashion. Darma’s deliberate positioning of the artwork first mirrors the uniformity of the sarong’s pattern before embodying the glitches inflicted on it.
Each composition features artifacts from the NUS Museum’s South and Southeast Asia Collection. These artifacts are imaged and distorted, playing with their museological status of incomplete provenance. Through these glitches, fragments of these cultural samples bleed through the matrix in oversaturated hues reminiscent of digital color modes. Darma decorates these panels with digital brushstrokes synthesized from past exhibitions and artwork. Viridescent greens and fluorescent yellows scatter across each panel as an extension of Darma’s spontaneity. Polychromatic in nature, this abstract composition reflects the tension inherent to discourses on authenticity amid cultural overproduction.
Polyurethane varnish, polyethylene vinyl, and polyvinyl chloride materialize these images into its physical form. Such media are an amalgamation of other materials, adding another layer to this subtext surrounding cultural overproduction. As a part of the abstraction process, Darma constructs each image and digital brushstroke with polyvinyl strips. By placing them in discordant order, glitches and distortions are further drawn out in these compositions. This is the method in which the artist continues the process of remixing and sampling into the individual pieces themselves.
The final component of the installation underscores the anonymity in this visual soundscape. The panels and images are captioned with the accession numbers of the artifacts from the Museum’s collections. By choosing this approach in amplifying serial numbers, and somewhat memorializing these artifacts, the artist seeks to circulate the biographies of these objects.
In addition to this, Darma alludes to the digitization of these artifacts as he subtitles the artwork in this manner. With the tension between tradition and technological progress, this is the way in which the artist ingeniously legitimizes the role of digital media in cultural landscapes. This parallels the accreditation of Artificial Intelligence machine ChatGPT as the writer of a pantun (traditional Malay poetry) featured in the artwork. These elements of the installation add to the artist’s perspective that machines and technology are not just tools, but also collaborators in creative processes and the accumulation of cultural capital.
Details of materials used: Polymethyl methacrylate (Acrylic Tiger), epoxy resin (NicPro), chameleon carbon fibre polyvinyl chloride and polyacrylate adhesive (Vvivid XPO) on anodized aluminium alloy, polyurethane varnish on digital print on polyethylene vinyl (Oracle), honeycomb retroreflective tape (Grip-On), non-metallised reflective tape (Steve & Leif).
Production date 2023 - 2023
Credit lineGift of Fyerool Darma
