Installation view of We docked by the magenta line as installed at
Gedung Kuning, Singapore in 2019
was a durational installation with items, objects acquired
and collected detritus from vicinity of Kampong Glam.
Conceived with assistance from Azri Azman,
Dhiya Muhammad, shif, Hazri, Spegepeng,
Khairy, wan_zemmy, @budyoung and cenderawa$ey, 2019 - 2020
The exercise references Kampong Gelam’s history through
a 19th century piece of Malay literature entitled Sya’ir Kampung Gelam Terbakar,
written by Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (also known as Munshi Abdullah).
In doing so, the work shifts the axis of Kampong Gelam’s importance away
from the larger colonial imagination to that
of local public memory instead - specifically,
of a great fire that ravaged the district in 1847.
The work, monument-like, is a deliberation,
a site of commemoration and the display of both
the loss incurred by the fire, but also the seeming loss
of the sites history,
now buried under the sediment
of the district’s transformation in recent years.
The objects within the was updated on March,
with another intended iteration in April 2020.
However due to the lockdown impacted by the pandemic in 2020,
the works final intended outcome was interrupted and not realised.