EXHIBITION

𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔 𝒊𝒕 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝒃𝒆 𝑴𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒚𝒔𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒐𝒅𝒂𝒚’𝒔 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅?

Opening in August 2025 at Hin Bus Depot, negaraku II advances a sustained curatorial inquiry into the constructs of Malaysian identity, belonging, and the socio-political conditions that underpin the formation of national consciousness. As the second iteration of an ongoing exhibition series, negaraku II mobilises contemporary art as a critical framework through which to examine the mediations of culture, power, and citizenship in Malaysia’s postcolonial present.

Curated by Ivan Gabriel and produced by Hin Bus Depot, this edition continues to draw from the private collection of Bingley Sim and Ima Norbinsha, whose longstanding engagement with politically conscious and socially responsive art practices has resulted in archives of considerable critical value. While the collection charts the formal and conceptual developments within contemporary Malaysian art, it also maps the shifting contours of dissent, resistance, and representation within the country’s visual culture.

With the inaugural edition of negaraku setting the stage for the examination of visual articulations of nationhood, negaraku II extends this inquiry by accentuating the multiplicity of subjectivities that shape the Malaysian social composition. Central to this curatorial approach is an emphasis on liminal identities, citizens, migrants, and those who occupy the interstices of official categories, whose lived experiences are frequently marginalized or rendered invisible within dominant nationalist narratives. The exhibition thus resists singular or essentialist definitions of Malaysian-ness, instead framing identity as a fluid, contested, and relational construct.

In addition to the works drawn from the collectors’ archives, the exhibition is structured around public programmes that denaturalises dominant hierarchies of access and interpretation within curatorial practice. Multilingual guided tours, in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, and Sign Language, privilege linguistic and sensory plurality as essential modalities of engagement, reconfiguring the act of interpretation as a shared and inclusive process. Accessibility is not approached as an ancillary concern but is instead embedded into the curatorial framework as a foundational principle, positioning inclusivity as a methodology through which the exhibition interrogates the structural conditions that shape the formation of publics and the production, mediation, and circulation of cultural knowledge within the Malaysian art ecosystem.

Within the exhibition, food is framed as a foundational epistemological site, disrupting its conventional positioning as peripheral or symbolic, which in turn enables expanded readings of cultural memory, embodied knowledge, and the social formations that sustain them. Building on this framing, the incorporation of communal culinary practices, specifically the live preparation of Roti Jala and Nasi Ulam, unsettles conventional spatial and knowledge frameworks of the gallery, repositioning it as an ephemeral assembly of embodied engagement and collective meaning-making. In this context, the act of cooking becomes both a performative gesture and a pedagogical mechanism, a generative practice through which intergenerational memory is communicated and shared. By privileging the aesthetic and political significance of the quotidian, the curatorial gesture resists entrenched binaries between high culture and the everyday. Through this repositioning, the exhibition rearticulates the kitchen, the table, and the act of sharing as domains of cultural production, thereby unsettling established hierarchies that subordinate multisensory modes of engagement to the visual.

Through its curatorial framing, negaraku II reopens the question of belonging, attending to the conditions under which it is shaped and the subjects to whom it is afforded or withheld. It asks us to look again at the faces and stories that shape the life of this country, and to imagine a Malaysia expansive enough to hold all its people, however they arrived here and however they find home.