A receptacle to all things archive within the prep-room, this microsite welcomes all to rest, peruse and examine the archival that prep-room Yang tidak lupa surfaces. Navigate, contend, make allies with the materials as you wish as the archive themselves are tailored to each work in the prep-room, to pose an exercise for visitors to comprehend socio-historical environments in the production and consumption of the work itself.
Here, it invites us contemporary beings to learn the vernacular of the archives by piecing together these contextual clues, formed from our intertextual (re)reading of both artworks and archives. Comprehending the language of the archives is the primary step that facilitates a nuanced way of reading histories of art.
About prep-room Yang tidak lupa
…(A)rtists saperti kami merasa kenyang dengan melukis! ((A)rtists like us feel full with just creating art!
Rohani Ismail to Georgette Chen, 9 June 1964, Georgette Chen’s Archives
Yang Tidak Lupa (“The one who did not forget”) is a prep-room project exploring the multiple ways of tracing feminine identities in Malaya and Singapore’s art world, from the 1960s to the 1990s. It inquires further on methods of (re)reading the ‘feminine body’ through their visual depictions and/or embodied realities, all deeply subjective and relational – while also holding space for future feminist interventions in Singapore’s histories of art. This prep-room DRILLS is a first activation of the space, where the open studio allows for public viewing and conversations with the curator, encouraging the threads of responses, deliberations, and discourse to enter the fabric of both the prep-room and public memory.
This prep-room project initiated by Nurul Kaiyisah, the NUS Museum’s inaugural Young Museum Professional Trainee (YMPT).
As the Museum’s YMPT, she works closely with the curatorial team in assisting other prep-room projects such as Intimate Landscapes, facilitating Outreach programmes that activates the exhibition space and producing curated material as guides for the Museum’s permanent exhibition, Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations About Art. Having graduated from the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) History department, Kaiyisah’s interests lie in examining possible interventions in canonical histories, within the intersectional, contemporary lens of gender and museology. The prep-room Yang tidak lupa is the final stage of her YMPT journey that observes the interaction between her research interests and engagement with the Museum’s collections, as informed by her traineeship at the Museum.
To view the curatorial essay for prep-room Yang tidak lupa, click here.
Archival realm | prep-room Yang tidak lupa 