[Post-Script] Jemput...Tengok

Content Advisory Warning: This session features moving images with partial nudity. Viewer 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.

Prelude

In Yang tidak lupa (2022–2023), prep-room collaborator Nurul Kaiyisah revisited archival material through a feminist lens, tracing feminine identities in Malaya’s art world from the 1960s to the 1990s. The project began with her serendipitous encounter with the intimate letters between artists Rohani Ismail and Georgette Chen. These correspondences revealed idiosyncratic worlds of their own—personal voices that unsettled canonical art histories and posed the question of whether such subjective, fragmentary materials might offer a more plural way of reading the histories of women artists.

Framed within the prep-room as both an archival display and a curatorial intervention, Yang tidak lupa drew connections between artworks, archival fragments, artists’ statements, sketches, and exhibition histories. This intertextual approach invited audiences to learn the “vernacular of the archives,” piecing together contextual clues to understand the socio-historical conditions that shaped the production and reception of art. In doing so, the project foregrounded how women’s artistic and intellectual labour have too often been marginalised, and how their roles—as interlocutors, collaborators, and creators—remain under-acknowledged in Singapore’s art history.

Gallery view of Yang tidak lupa (2023).

Jemput...Tengok: Revisitng Yang tidak lupa

Drawing from Nurul Kaiyisah’s contributions to prep-room: Yang tidak lupa (2022–2023), the final session of Post-Script, Jemput…Tengok (Welcome…Look), turns its gaze toward the feminine body and its representations in art.

Building on Yang tidak lupa’s feminist rereading of archival fragments and women’s artistic labour in Malaya’s art world, Jemput…Tengok examines how the feminine body becomes a site of visibility, performance, and consumption. Through moving images and conversation with artist Nurul Atiqah Zaidi, the session reflects on how the gaze—both historical and contemporary—shapes the ways femme bodies are seen, remembered, and desired.

Structured in two acts, the first unfolds through Kirsten Tan’s Fonzi (2006) and Yanyun Chen and Sara Chong’s Women in Rage (2019), reflecting on the cinematic gaze and the politics of looking. The second act features Wanita, Wani-Nata, Wani-Ditata (Woman, Brave to Rule, Dare to be Policed) (2023–2025) by Nurul Atiqah Zaidi and its extension, Wanita Cuci Darah (Women Washing Blood) (2025), a video-performance lecture by the artist and Nurul Kaiyisah, where the body becomes a site of labour, endurance, and reclamation.

Together, Yang Tidak Lupa and Jemput…Tengok offer a lens through which to read and re-read femme bodies in art as agents of labour, resistance, and becoming.

Find out more about the series here.

About the Programmer

Nurul Kaiyisah (Kai, she/they) is a researcher based in Singapore, exploring the intersections of gender, archives, and art history with a focus on feminist historiographical approaches to artistic practices and narratives. Central to her work is the inquiry: how can we read history(ies) contingently from the vernacular and archival? Kaiyisah has extensive experience as a cultural worker, which notably includes curating the prep-room:Yang tidak lupa (The one who did not forget) (2022-2023) as NUS Museum’s inaugural Young Museum Professional Trainee. She was recently awarded the National Library Singapore Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship, where she is currently furthering her research on Malay/Jawi art writings produced during Singapore’s independence period.

About the Artist

Nurul Atiqah Zaidi (Singapore) is an interdisciplinary artist and women’s advocate whose practice spans performance, material manipulation, and lens-based media. Currently pursuing a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Singapore, she views art as a platform for critique and dialogue that connects communities.

Working through a feminist lens, Atiqah explores the deconstruction of normatives and seeks to reclaim the over-sexualised female body through the feminine gaze. Drawing from feminist thought across art, fashion, film, and culture, her works interrogate identity, cultural politics, and the intersectional experiences of women, particularly within the Malay-Javanese community. Her practice ultimately aims to spark conversation, challenge entrenched archetypes, and advocate for more inclusive representations of womanhood.