My Own Words: Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
NTU CCA Singapore Artists-in-Residence Programme and “world”
By Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
In early 2023, I began artistic research into the English word “world" based on its innovative use, particularly through the lens of linguistic creativity. I was motivated by the idea of “minor literature”, or minor usage of a major language, language mixing and creative misuse in linguistics. The word “world” undergoes a semantic shift when spoken in informal Malay, mainly referring to self-aggrandising claims to everyday confabulation in conversations.
While it is understood as a pejorative within such a specific speech community, I am fascinated by its creative potential as a form of speech act. Here, I am inspired by such “performances” in everyday chitchat, and the intersection of social agency, identity and desire.
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, ‘Proximities’, 2022, exhibition view at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Image courtesy of the artist and Rifdi Rosly.
Having departed from my previous series which focused on the trope of the Malay boy, mainly found in the works of the late artist Cheong Soo Pieng, I continue ruminating on the notion of worlding, a postcolonial term repurposed by thinker Gayatri Spivak. Worlding references the turning of colonised spaces through cartography, writing and everyday interactions.
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, ‘Proximities’ (film still), single-channel video, 10:13, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
World and the Pavilion
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, exhibition view at Studio of Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, Residencies OPEN, 12 – 13 August 2023. Image courtesy of NTU CCA Singapore.
I had the chance to develop ideas surrounding “world” during my time with the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) Singapore Artist-in-Residence Programme. I have located “world’” within urban spaces of Singapore, particularly in pavilions amongst public housing. As common spaces, they are sites where socialisation occurs.
As “world” is comparable to everyday confabulation as a speech act, I interpret it as recuperative, where memory becomes a creative process of desiring. Here, I use the word “desire” with reference to Eve Tuck’s thesis on the desire-based research framework, which is “concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives.”¹ As such, confabulation, while associated with truth claims and errors, interacts with memory by producing innocent embellishments. When inflected with Eve Tuck’s framework, they become a desirous extension of one's complex self.
Here, “memory” becomes more than a backward glance, but one that straddles between the authoring of stories and histories. As such, memories are equally shaped based on quotidian exchanges like chit-chat and gossip.
Pavilion as Monument
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, ‘Pavilion as Monument’, 2024, collage on Aquafine paper, 21 x 30cm each. Image courtesy of the artist and Ji Yang.
When we consider the above through the perspective of “performance”, or as Charles Garoian would posit, the body (in this sense, within the pavilion) performs “various aspects of production, socially and historically constructed behaviours that are learned and reproduced.”² Extending this, “world” as a “performance of subjectivity” would refer to the agencies learned between conversants “to critique dominant cultural paradigms from the perspective of personal memories and cultural histories.”³ This is set against the context of a scripted urban landscape where one is ideologically entangled.⁴ Through such negotiations, the pavilion becomes an active space; an archive, a monument and a repository.
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, ‘The World Rolled off His Tongue’, 2024, collage on Aquafine paper, 21 x 30cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Ji Yang.
In my work, ‘Pavilion as Monument’, I articulate the pavilion as a set of propositions, animating the absent body through fragmented parts. They become notations of stories that are collapsible, precarious, embellished, and take different personalities through their names. For instance, in ‘The World Rolled off His Tongue’ or ‘A World Sits in His Rib’, they suggest incipient desires — or to invoke J. L. Austin, “how to do things with words”.
“In my work, ‘Pavilion as Monument’, I articulate the pavilion as a set of propositions, animating the absent body through fragmented parts. They become notations of stories that are collapsible, precarious, embellished, and take different personalities through their names.”
Embodying the World
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, ‘Java Historical Society’, 2024, 3D print, found desk and sand, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
At the same time, based on the self-generating proposition of ‘world’, my recent relocation to the United States for my graduate studies has inevitably exposed me to American histories like the World Columbian Exposition. I initially sought company in the former, particularly in the Javanese Village that was part of the fair. It was reported that the Javanese Village was pre-constructed in Java and dismantled for shipping to Chicago.
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, ‘Java Historical Society’ (Photo), 2024, digital print on matte photo paper, found desk and pin, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
This became an evocative mental image. I imagine the process of knowledge transmission akin to such processes: constructed, broken down, and made up again. As such, I embark on the performance of “collapsing” various American histories based on their collision with Southeast Asian markers. They eventually included other events: the buried ghost town of Singapore, Michigan, to a historical society in Java Village, New York.
Here, the succession of stories I compose is constantly revised to blur their points of origin. Objects become placeholders and are switched, buried and unearthed. The structures that hold stories of events are made collapsible, folded into one another and hinge precariously on edges. Perhaps, a slip would generate a different broken proposition, but somehow erected again through makeshift attempts. By taking two similar stories to become one, a global immersion ensues. Here, “world” as a performance, or rather, an experiment through writing, plotting, making, and most definitely, confabulating, expands a new landscape.
Naturally, those with the penchant to confabulate are pathologised to be dishonest, if not dismissed for being disconnected from the world. However, inherent in such enthusiastic proclamations are desires to belong. While this could be a bid for connection to one’s immediate locality or that of global belonging, “world” never fails to push one into becoming.
2Charles R. Garoian, Performing pedagogy: Toward an art of politics, (New York: Suny Press, 1999), 8.
3Garoian, Performing pedagogy, 8.
4Limin Hee and Ooi Giok Ling, "The politics of public space planning in Singapore," Planning Perspectives 18, no. 1 (2003): 79-103.
About the Writer
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee is a Singaporean artist-curator currently based in Chicago. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois Chicago with a Fulbright study grant.
