MAKING SPACE: We Are Where We Aren’t was presented by The Japan Foundation as part of Run and Learn, a regional curator development programme. For the Kuala Lumpur edition, I curated an exhibition that explored the spatial and psychic gaps within the city, reflecting on the paradoxes of our increasingly privatised urban condition.
In Malaysia, such spaces — while symptomatic of neoliberal urbanism — can also offer refuge from state mandates that seek to regulate public expression and national identity. Set in a derelict building repurposed as a guesthouse by landscape architect Ng Sek San, the exhibition unfolded across its sunlit interiors and surrounding streets. Artists responded to the building’s layered architecture and its liminal context through sculpture, installation, and site-based interventions.
Works included a vertical garden camouflaging a urinal and wheat-pasted fictions of local fauna translated into migrant languages like Burmese, inviting new publics into the storytelling fabric of the city. The opening night momentarily transformed this forgotten corner of Kuala Lumpur into a site of autonomous gathering, curiosity, and exchange.
Okui Lala with Mostofa Kamal, As If Home, (2015)
Video 6.26min | Penang, Malaysia
As If, Home reflects on the meaning of home through the act of building. In this video, Bangladeshi construction worker Mostofa teaches local participant Okui how to construct a model house. As they work, the piece highlights the invisible presence of migrant labour in Malaysia’s built environment, where many like Mostofa leave home for years to build a future elsewhere. “The first inhabitant of a new house,” he says, “is the builder — not the one who moves in.”
