[Post-Script] after After Ballads: Errant Footnotes

Content Advisory Warning: This session features moving images with flashing lights that may affect viewers who are sensitive to light. Visitor discretion is advised.

About the series

Post-Script, a moving image and conversation series, invites audiences to think of the archive as a living, shifting space. Across three sessions, it extends the inquires seeded in the ongoing exhibition, Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art and associated prep-room projects.

The prep-room is a space for experimentation where ideas are tested, archives are revisited, and exhibition-making becomes an open, process-driven dialogue. Many of these projects now find renewed life in the Radio Malaya permanent exhibition, where traces of their research continue to resonate beyond their conclusions.

Post-Script returns to these projects in a new form, using the moving image as a medium to revisit and reframe their themes. Each session is co-programmed with past prep-room collaborators, engaging with the central concerns of the original research—from the fluidity of identity and the movement of bodies across borders, to feminist re-readings of the archive, to the remixing and re-contextualisation of cultural memory.

Gallery view of After Ballads, NUS Museum, 2018.

Prelude

In After Ballads (2017–2019), artist Fyerool Darma explored the fluid boundaries between fact and fiction, and how narratives shape contemporary consciousness. Conceived as an evolving prep-room project, it unfolded in multiple phases where objects, texts, and images were continually introduced, withdrawn, and remixed.

Drawing on literary foundations, museological artefacts, and allegorical displays, Fyerool treated the exhibition itself as a space of performance—one that unsettled the authority of historical accounts while proposing alternative, more fragmentary ways of reading. Rather than offering closure, After Ballads foregrounded translation, misidentification, and glitching as tactics for thinking through the legacies of (de)coloniality. Visitors encountered shifting constellations of material, where absence was as significant as presence, and where the line between the archive and imagination was deliberately blurred.

Today, traces of this inquiry remain in the Museum’s ongoing exhibition, Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art through Fyerool’s work P♥rtraire Familiya (2023). Positioned among fragments of other histories, it stands as a reminder of the gaps that persist in our knowledge of archival material, prompting us to ask: where do these materials come from, and how have their cultural representations been re-contextualised, remixed, or estranged over time?

In Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art. Fyerool Darma, P♥rtraire Familiya (2023); Polymethyl methacrylate (Acrylic Tiger), epoxy resin (NicPro), chameleon carbon fibre polyvinylchloride and polyacrylate adhesive (Vvivid XPO) on anodized aluminium alloy, polyurethane varnish on digital print on polyethylene vinyl (Oracle), honeycomb retroreflective tape (Grip-On), non metalized reflective tape (Steve & Leif) on polymethyl methacrylate (Acrylic Tiger), 400 x 300 cm.

after After Ballads: Errant Footnotes

Drawing from artist Fyerool Darma’s prep-room project After Ballads (2016–2018), the second Post-Script session, after After Ballads: Errant Footnotes, gathers videos that slip between margins, glitches, and fragments. The prep-room unfolded as an evolving inquiry into the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, where artefacts, texts, and displays were introduced, withdrawn, and remixed as ways of questioning the authority of historical accounts. This session extends that spirit of disruption, presenting videos that resist the main text of history to speak instead from its footnotes.

Opening with Khairullah Rahim’s Terang Benderang (Clear and Vivid) (2024), halogen light burns across the frame until ornament becomes resistance and survival shimmers in overexposed brightness. Fyerool Darma’s The Poseur (2019) and P4thf!nd3r (2023-2024) follow, fragmenting terrain into corrupted searches and counterfeit histories, where the mask becomes a method, and fugitivity, a form of survival. The sequence closes with Priyageetha Dia’s Night Shift (2025), a nocturnal drift across unseen infrastructures, where labour and shadow blur into ritual, and every dance insists on existence.

These videos do not annotate the archive — they haunt it. Moving across atmosphere, code, body, and screen, they conjure errant footnotes that remain uncontainable, asking us to consider what slips away, what resists, and what persists in the margins of history.

Find out more about the series here.

Lookout for Session 3: Jemput…Tengok: Revisiting Yang Tidak Lupa (22 October).

About the Artist

Fyerool Darma (b. 1987, Singapore) integrates sound, video, new media, sculpture, texts and craft practices into his object and material experimentations, which juxtapose the aesthetics and ideology of modernism alongside Southeast Asian cultures, histories, aesthetics, and politics. He has gradually developed a complex visual vocabulary that draws from sources including tangible and intangible Malay heritage, archives, the Internet, literature, popular culture, the history of craft, visual arts, manufacturing, and manual labour.

Darma’s works have been exhibited at the Centre of Heritage Art and Textiles, Hong Kong (2024); La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2023); NTU ADM Gallery, Singapore (2023); Seoul MediaCity Biennale, Seoul Art Museum (2023); Singapore Art Museum (2023); National Gallery Singapore (2022-23), among others.