Think Tank, Bela Biennale - Rio Di Janeiro 2014

in  nov 2014, i participated in Bela Biennale, an art festival between the Nordic country and south america, namely Brazil.
i brought with me a documentation of my new work called ' think tank'. think tank is a project i did in collaboration with Robotics Learning Center Malaysia Sdn Bhd.

here is the text written by Intan Rafiza, a curator from the National Art Gallery Malaysia on the project.


( In malay )
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Runtuhnya langit kebebasan dan demokrasi apabila seni itu sendiri tidak lagi menjadi cerminan hari ini.

Melihat semula karya terdahulu oleh Amir Zainorin, beliau memberi pandangan paradigm social-politik Malaysia dalam pemerhatian dan  persoalan yang kritikal melalui perspektif seorang rakyat Malaysia dan juga antarabangsa. Pengkarya melihat bagaimana seni menjadi ruang untuk  berkarya dan memberi pandangan dalam membentuk imaginasi melalui visual berdasarkan keadaan sosial sebenar dan dalam masa yang sama ianya  membina satu ruang untuk berkomunikasi.

Karya terkini yang telah dihasilkan pada 2014, bertajuk –Think Tank adalah satu karya installasi dan seni pertunjukan  bersifat interaktif yang dihasilkan untuk Bela Biennial 2014 di ruang Museu Histirico National, Rio De Jenairo Brasil. Dengan saiz yang lebih kecil dari kereta kebal sebenar, ianya adalah hasil kerjasama dengan Robotic Learning Malaysia. 

Di dalam karya ini, kereta kebal menjadi subjek utama yang mana bentuk fizikal karya mempunyai ciri-ciri kekuatan, kekukuhan dan ianya bercirikan  kenderaan pertahanan yang tinggi. Dan merujuk kepada pensejarahan beberapa dekad yang lepas, ianya digunakan dalam perang dunia pertama yang mana penciptaannya adalah sebagai alat pertahanan dan perlindungan tentera di medan peperangan, berfungsi dalam pertahanan dan juga senjata dalam pergerakan operasi perang. Teknologi dan ciptaan kereta kebal turut memperlihatkan spesifikasi utama dalam menyerang dan melindung di medan tempur. 

Dan dalam masa yang sama, bulu burung yang menyeliputi kereta kebal memperlihatkan unsur yang berlawanan diantara kedua-dua  fizikal karya. Malahan  didalam karya ini, Amir Zainorin cuba menghasilkan satu  karya dari gabungan kedua-dua unsur ini. Ianya berinspirasikan bulu burung yang merujuk kepada topi tradisional yang dikenali dengan nama ‘lelanjang’ yang pernah dipakai oleh para pemburu kepala (ngayau) pada suatu ketika dahulu. Pemakaian kostum ini adalah berhubungkait dengan aktiviti amalan buru kepala yang mana ianya adalah salah satu amalan kuno taktik peperangan masyarakat melayu borneo di Malaysia.  Selain daripada itu juga, penggunaan bulu burung  turut digunapakai oleh kaum asal yang lain contohnya dari orang asal Amerika yang membawa erti dan makna dalam kehidupan seharian. Melalui acara ritual yang memperlambangkan kebebasan manusia dan semangat -rohani-spiritual , ianya juga adalah berdasarkan suku-kaum masyarakat yang berbeza.

Melalui kepercayaan kepada alam, penggunaan bahan semulajadi ini membentuk satu idea dan kefahaman kerohanian yang berhubung dengan alam semesta. Komposisi yang dihasilkan melalui penyatuan penggunaan alat perang kereta kebal dan kerohanian melalui  penggunaan bulu burung oleh pahlawan terdahulu, pengamat dan penonton seni diberi ruang interaksi dengan memberi peluang kepada penonton melancarkan warna dari mercu meriam kereta kebal. Unsur dan teknikal interaktif ini adalah dihasilkan dalam kontek dimana pengkarya cuba memberi kefahaman dan peluang kepada penonton untuk memahami karya seni yang disampaikan.

Dalam proses membentuk idea Think Tank, melalui perspektif satu karya seni yang jelas dengan mengenengahkan kepentingan yang tidak ketara, (bermaksud penonton masih boleh mempersoalkan dan membincangan berkaitan idea) diantara objek yang digunakan melalui pendekatan penciptaan melalui teknologi terkini dan nilai kepercayaan kerohanian (spiritual).Tembakan warna dari mercu meriam terus ke ruang didinding secara tidak langsung ianya telah mewujudkan satu platform dialog seni secara visual dalam meyampaikan karya seni. Yang mana ianya turut menunjukkan bagaimana tindakan manusia boleh memberi kesan dan  akibat yang menjadi penyebab kepada  sesuatu hal dan tindakan.

Disini juga posisi pengkarya adalah menjadi pengantara dalam aktiviti komunikasi diantara karya seni dan penonton. Pengkarya memberikan satu  bentuk seni yang jelas dan nyata tentang kepentingan maksud demokrasi melalui sistem bermasyarakat melalui skop budaya dan penglibatan masyarakat awam khasnya. Kepentingan komunikasi secara interlektual diwujudkan dalam ruang kreativiti yang menjadi subjek utama dalam proses berkarya.  

Melihat semula karya seni Amir Zainorin yang menjadi koleksi tetap Balai Seni Visual  Negara Malaysia, ianya adalah diantara karya koleksi negara yang mempunyai kekuatan dari sudut perletakan imajan dan penerokaan idea dari pengkarya dengan pendekatan dan kefahaman tersendiri. Stamp Series, adalah salah satu dari 3 koleksi karya yang mempunyai proses pendokumentasian yang jelas berkenaan tanggapan pensejarahan para perajurit kemerdekaan 1957 yang berjasa dalam memperjuangan kebebasan negara dari penjajah yang mana mereka adalah terdiri dari latar belakang politik dan ideologi yang berbeza.

Dalam karya ini ianya memperlihatkan satu perspektif baru tentang perjuangan merdeka bukanlah milik mana-mana parti politik, tetapi ianya adalah berkenaan kesatuan masyarakat ketika itu. Selain daripada itu juga, satu seni pertunjukan yang telah dipersembahkan di hadapan pejabat Imigresen, Copenhagen, Denmark pada tahun 2010, yang bertajuk -Stamp Over, turut di kongsi bersama dan dipamerkan pada tahun 2012 di Balai Seni Lukis Negara Malaysia  bersempena Hari Kemerdekaan negara Malaysia  dalam pameran – Kuasa, Harapan dan Tanah. Dalam karya ini, ianya memperkatakan berkenaan isu-isu pendatang (imagran) dari pelbagai aspek dan kesan budaya, perbezaan pengstrukturan masyarakat dan sosial serta bagaimana hal ini mempengaruhi masalah dan latar belakang prinsip dalam perbezaan kepercayaan. 

Sebagai seorang rakyat Malaysia, yang berhijrah ke negara lain, Amir Zainorin telah menghasilkan karya dalam pendekatan dan cuba menjawap beberapa persoalan dalam hal yang berkaitan dengan isu-isu  sosio-politik di Malaysia. Dalam permasalahan ini, beliau melihat bagaimana pembangunan negara yang menuju kemodenan secara fizikal dan adanya  perjuangan hak kemanusiaan melalui pengamalan sistem demokrasi  adalah menjadi titik utama dalam mengenengahkan isu dan persoalan yang diingin disampaikan.

Memahami erti kemajuan minda dalam ruang negara yang sedang pesat membangun, mempunyai pemikiran yang lebih kritis berkenaan isu dan juga hal yang memberi kesan kepada perspektif  permasalahan utama kenegaraan adalah amat penting dalam menjadi seorang pengkarya seni. Perbezaan pendapat atau mempersoalkan sesuatu dalam erti kata dalam meruntuhkan tembok yang menghalangi kebenaran bukanlah satu kesalahan sekiranya pengkarya seni itu sendiri tahu bagaimana untuk menyampaikannya  dengan cara yang lebih mudah melalui kreativiti dan dialog seni lebih yang berkesan (dialogis).

Think Tank – apabila zaman silam itu itu sebenarnya adalah masa depan kita.

Oleh Intan Rafiza

Nov. 2014

in english translated by Sharon Chin

Freedom and democracy fail when art no longer serves as a reflection of today. Looking at his previous work, artist Amir Zainorin supplies points of view about Malaysian socio-political paradigms through the critical observations both as a Malaysian national and as a citizen of the world. He looks at how art becomes a space for expression. Through reality-based visuals, he shapes the imagination, providing insight into contemporary social conditions. He builds space for communication.

Amir’s latest work, titled Think Tank and produced in 2014, is an installation and interactive performance piece. It was made for the Bela Biennial 2014, in Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Historico Nacional and Galeria Scenarium. The work is a  collaboration with Robotic Learning Malaysia.

In this work, a military tank serves as the primary subject. Its physical form communicates strength and resolve. Historically, tanks were introduced during the First World War. It was invented as a defensive device, used to protect troops in battle, and serving as a safeguard for weapons and fortifications on the battlefield. As technology developed, tanks have played both defensive and offensive roles in war.

The bird feathers that envelop the tank serve as contrast to the physicality of the armored vehicle. This is a reference to the bird feathers found on the headgear (lelanjang) worn by headhunters (ngayau) of the past. This costume is associated with the practice of head-hunting – an archaic war tactic of the Malays in Malaysian Borneo. Besides this, the bird feathers also reflects its use by other indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans – whose use of the material carries its own significance in their daily lives, through rituals that emblematize human and spiritual freedom.

Amir’s use of natural materials evokes the spiritual ideal of connecting with the universe. The composition pairs a modern weapon of war (the tank) with the spiritual beliefs of past  warriors (the bird feathers). The audience is invited to interact with the work by launching colourful paint from the tank’s main cannon. Through this interactivity, the artist hopes to bring audiences closer to understanding the ideas presented in his work.

Think Tank is not a didactic work, and viewers are still able to bring in many associations and related ideas, which may inhabit the space between the tank (a technological creation) and the feathers (symbolizing spirituality). The firing of paint from the tank’s canon onto the wall indirectly sets up a dialogue about what makes a work of art. It also points to the cause and effect that accompany every action we humans undertake. Here, the artist has become an intermediary, facilitating communication between the artwork and its audience. The work speaks clearly about the importance of democracy in society, involving both the cultural sphere and participation of the public.

The works of Amir Zainorin in the permanent collection of Balai Seni Visual Negara are strong, demonstrating the placement of images and exploration of ideas by an artist who has his own approach and point of view. Stamp Series -- one of the three collected works – demonstrates a documentarian’s process, and how this contributes to the way the freedom fighters of 1957 are viewed historically. They were not a homogenous group, instead, consisted of individuals from different backgrounds and ideologies.

The work presents another perspective of the struggle for Merdeka – namely, that the independence movement did not belong to any one political party, but involved a society working in unity at the time.

A performance piece, Stamp Over, first performed in front of the Copenhagen immigration office in 2010, was exhibited at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara in 2012. This was in conjunction with Merdeka Day, and was part of the the “Kuasa, Harapan dan Tanah” show. This work explored the issue of “pendatang” (immigrants) – looking at the differences in the way communities and societies are structured, and how this affects the underlying principles of multi-culturalism. 

A Malaysian citizen who now lives abroad, Amir Zainorin has nonetheless continued to produce works that center on the social-political issues of Malaysia. The matter of human rights and democracy in a rapidly developing country that is bent on modernisation is a major starting point for the artist. Understanding what it means to be mentally progressive, thinking critically and being concerned with social issues are essential in being an artist. If artists are skillful in communicating their intentions, having differences of opinion or questioning the rightfulness of a situation is something to be encouraged.

 Think Tank – when the past actually tells of our future.

By Intan Rafiza

Curator National Visual Art Gallery

Tranlation from Malay to English by Sharon Chin

Amir Zainorin - 'Me, We' by Sharon Chin

Amir is someone I’ve yet to meet in person. I know him only through email, blogs, Facebook and a parcel containing catalogues and a DVD of his work he sent to my house. Yet from these thin, mostly electronic, threads we are weaving a conversation, the beginnings of understanding, and perhaps a friendship.

What do I know about Amir? He grew up in Kelantan and Johor. He studied in the US, returned to work in Malaysia and now lives in Denmark with his wife and son. It’s no surprise that his art deals with identity and representation – living and working in different places can turn your sense of self into putty. Even crossing the street or buying bread becomes a cultural experiment!

The questions of identity are the eternal ones: Who am I? Who are we? At the same time, these questions have an everyday urgency, like buying bread. Somewhere in between there lies a political dimension, where this ‘who’ becomes a ‘what’ – What am I? What are we? In that political space, identity is associated with power.

What is it like to be Malaysian right now? Interesting would be one way to put it. Scary would be another. Since the March 2008 general elections, we have been living in times of huge political change. The political dimension has expanded to touch every aspect of life. You couldn’t escape it even if you wanted to – the roads will likely be jammed tight because of some by-election.

Issues of identity have become especially heightened and complex. Old certainties are now up for questioning – the social contract, the monarchy, even the federation itself. It is as though we are waking up from a collective dream, dazed and confused, but more energized than we have been in decades. Our political masters feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. In order to rally support to new political needs, desperate games are played that draw lines deeply in the raw, soft sand of our identities. Being told what we are (Bumiputera, Si botol, Si mata sepet, Dan lain-lain) makes us much more manageable, just like in the colonial days.

It is into this space, that Amir brings his art and his questions: Who am I? Who are we?I won’t betray the spirit of Amir’s work by limiting its scope to this specific moment in Malaysian identity politics. He clearly states: ‘Even though I am a Malaysian citizen, I don’t see myself as a ‘Malaysian artist’. I am just an artist, born in Malaysia with a big interest in what is going on in the world. My influence is global, not only based on my roots in Malaysia.’ However, by locating it here, we can see how Amir’s search is not about trying to establish answers. Instead, it’s concerned with enlarging the space of how we can look at and make meaning of ourselves.

He starts with a view of himself – a self-portrait. The video Mind My Hat shows him donning variously the headgears of the Sultan, Tok Guru Nik Aziz, a Jew, Yap Ah Loy, Uncle Sam and many others. Watching it on Youtube, I wondered about the lo-fi quality – you can clearly see where the images have been digitally altered to replace Amir’s face with that of the abovementioned subjects. It uses the rough cut n’ paste techniques of most internet ‘mash ups’, that is, digital videos, music or images that consist of original content altered in some way. Amir’s self-portrait treats images, including his own, like disposable shells – each one recognizable for an instant, then falling away to reveal nothing but another image, and another. We may well ask ourselves what such disposable images are doing in a gallery, a place where we expect images (paintings, photographs, etc) to be precious… valuable…

The question brings us to the subject of Pop Art. There is tendency in Malaysian artists and intellectuals to confuse Pop Art with a technique or ‘style’, rather than recognize it as a particular moment in the development of modern art in Europe and America. Campbell soup cans, bright colours, Andy Warhol, silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley selling for millions of bucks – this is what Pop art means for many people. In an essay for one of Amir’s previous solo exhibitions, Mad(e) In Malaysia, Badrolhisham Tahir says as much: ‘Amir is known as a Pop artist. This is what many don’t understand and want to know more about.’ He goes on: ‘Sometimes a public story can become a powerful myth and even though we know how Amir became an artist, the public story has so much power, it becomes believable.’ Unfortunately, Badrolhisham doesn’t delve much deeper into the relationship between Amir’s ideas and Pop art, allowing the myth to hang in the air as part of the artist’s constructed identity.

Pop Art developed around the 1960s, at a time when western society was being reshaped and defined by its relationship to mass media (by late 1950s, TVs were to be found in almost every American home), fame and consumerism. Things other than objects could become commodities – such as human values or images. The perception of something could be more valuable than the thing itself, hence the rise of branding and advertising. When it came to determining value, fame (i.e. when something is widely known or reproduced) was just as, or more important than, exclusivity. Warhol explored these ideas in art by becoming an art machine, manufacturing images in the same way a factory produced canned soup. He commented on the system by being fully complicit in it. Decades after his death, his work continues to command astounding prices.

Today, we are living in a different world, one defined by instant connectivity and information technology. We can now broadcast ourselves every moment of every day, using digital text, images, video and sound. Amir’s ideas about how mass produced images influence the way we perceive identity, value and power are indeed related to those that gave rise to Pop art. In the series of digital prints, he creates new stories and narratives by digitally piecing together images found on the internet or taken on his digital camera. The images come from modern art, history, advertising, news, the landscape, family portraits, etc – it doesn’t matter. They are all flattened to create new, instant and disposable fairytales for a generation of Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter users.  

Like Warhol and the other Pop artists, Amir also plays these ideas off the art world. One work consists of Facebook updates collected from his network of friends over a period of 3 months. During this time, he updated his own status daily with thoughts about art. He has arranged these to produce a large digital print that reads ‘Status’. Placed in a gallery, these little fragments of selves literally and symbolically claim their status as art. Another work, Mr Prime Minister, looks like an average painting, but in fact, it has been out-sourced to a company in China that specializes in copies of famous masterpieces. Skilled labourers produced the painting according to a digital image created by Amir in Photoshop. These funny, quietly subversive works make us rethink how we view and value art.

Given that so much media content is disposable, how do we reconcile the fact that words and images continue to exert such power on us? It was only recently that cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) caused uproar across the world, erupting in violence and even death. Closer to home, the right of non-Muslims to use the word Allah has been fiercely debated. Again and again, this modern technological age will bring us into close encounters with those who are different from us. We will see and hear things that shake our beliefs, values and worldviews. How do we negotiate between what we must hold sacred and what we can hold in common? Or perhaps it is better to say: what we can hold sacred and what we must hold in common? Who am I? Who are we?

Yes, words and images hold immense power, but let’s not forget, so do actions. In a performance held at the entrance to the Danish embassy, Amir turns the usually de-humanizing process of visa application into an opportunity for human conversation and exchange. Meanwhile, his online project Like A Prayer asks people of any (or no) faith from all over the world to submit a prayer via email, which is then posted on a blog for everyone to read. Similarly, I see his three interviews with Malaysian art icons Redza Piyadasa, Jeri Azahari and Rahime Haron as acts of listening and recording. It is interesting to observe how actions are not subject to same games of representation and power. Through his interventions into real and online life, Amir illustrates that actions not only communicate, they open up pathways – roads for us to make meaning in art, in our lives and in the world.

Sharon Chin

Nov 2010