2024 to 2025
Muar & Malacca, Malaysia
Building a "non-institution" institution with Shooshie Sulaiman
Building a "non-institution" institution with Shooshie Sulaiman is a process-centred Fellowship that follows Shooshie’s intention to house a second iteration of an earlier work, Emotional Library (2007), in a shophouse based in Malacca. Shooshie’s artistic practice has never shied away from embracing the personal, intuitive and emotive. All of which Emotional Library (2007) exemplifies as the entry point to this Fellowship.
With this philosophy in mind, the Fellowship works towards developing Tadika Kura-kura (The Kindergarten of Slow Curating), a "curatorial software" grounded in generating and refining new knowledge systems, while building networks that expand the peripheries of artmaking through community and kinships that extend beyond the human. Working with the artist, Tadika Kura-kura serves as the prelude to how a new landscape may be realised. Using Tadika Kura-kura as a ‘curatorial software’, the Fellowship follows the artist’s construction of Emotional Library (A House), other related sites in Japan and Sulawesi as well as creative centers that not only engage with Shooshie’s practice but considers the public’s encounter with contemporary art.
Through a series of curatorial labs and programmes in both SAM and sites in Malaysia, the Fellowship’s underlying ethos is guided by incubating alternative curatorial models outside the museum while building critical museology around Shooshie’s practice. These processes will be shared on Samplings, SAM’s experimental writing platform conceptualised for showcasing curatorial research followed with a publication to be launched in the later part of 2025.
About the artist
Shooshie Sulaiman (b. 1973) is currently recognised as one of the most important contemporary artists of Southeast Asia. Drawing from the culture of her homeland of Malaysia, her mixed identity, as well as her personal memories, Shooshie's practice is characterised by her diverse approaches such as drawings, collages, installations, and performance that at times appropriate natural elements from trees, soil, and water native to the land. Through them, the works inform viewers of the complex and inextricably connected relationship between human beings, nature and art.
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