HIN ART RESIDENCY

Dhavinder Singh, born in 1983 and based in Kuala Lumpur, is an artist whose art practice centers on the repurposing and reconfiguring of materials through various mediums, including paintings, animation, assemblage, and site-specific installations. Trained at the Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA) and later at the Cardiff School of Art & Design in Fine Art, he consistently pushes the boundaries of his practice and explores diverse artistic mediums. Describing his creative process as rooted in intuition, he once expressed, "Emotionally, my creative process is guided by intuition. Through my body of work, I aim to express and convey a visual metaphor that reflects my response to specific spaces and subject matter."

During his residency at Hin Bus Depot from August to October 2023, Dhavinder presented the exhibition "All Day I Dream About Chairs" (September 16-October 8, 2023). This exhibition emerged from his artistic journey in Penang's vibrant heart, weaving dreams and memories into a profound tapestry of spaces. At its core, the exhibition explores the theme of dreams, featuring seven evocative paintings, each set against a dreamlike black backdrop. Each canvas narrates a unique tale, with chairs recurring as a poignant symbol that connects memory and emotion.

Kipras Petrulis, also known as Trexus was borned 1992 in Lithuania. From a young age, he was fascinated by graffiti more than he was interested in fine arts. He would rather skip school and spend the night in a police station than sit in a classroom and paint a chair for four hours. Growing up he started to notice that he became more and more attracted to canvases rather than walls and after discovering that his long dead grandfather and father were artists, he decided to transport the wisdom he learned in the streets onto canvases and into gallery showrooms. As an emerging artist, he already held solo shows in Vilnius (Lithuania), Berlin (Germany), Penang (Malaysia) and also left some murals in Paris (France), London, Manchester (UK) and Nowy Sacz (Poland).

During his residency at Hin Bus Depot, he presented two exhibitions 'Between The Lines (2020)' and 'Recycle or Get Recycled (2023)'.

Born in Jakarta and lived there for thirteen years, Sarita's family moved to Kuala Lumpur and she ended up staying there for about 7 years. After graduating from Middlesex University with a degree in illustration in 2009, Sarita eventually came back to Indonesia.

Working with weaving is something that Sarita has been interested deeply in for the past 5 years. It is exciting for Sarita to work with a medium that is very close to the body: fibre. It being one of the oldest crafts in the world, there are plenty of explorations she feels she can do with weaving.

We hosted Indonesian artist Sarita Ibnoe from April to June 2019. She had an open studio session during REKA (10-19 May 2019) where she shared her works on exploring traditional weaving techniques into artwork. She showcased her weaving final products alongside with her work in progress intending to show how the concept of weaving is being explored, rather than just a wearable product, but also into a piece of art that tells a story and as a representation of her days in Penang. She did 2 kinds of live weaving: on the existing window grill of Hin Bus Depot and another one with the loom.

Hin Art Residency run by Hin Bus Depot collaborated with Obscura Festival in hosting two artists from Germany - Joerg Brueggemann and Tobias Kruse; from January 2019 until 22 of Feb 2019.

Jöerg Brüggeman is a freelance photographer based in Berlin and part of OSTKREUZ – Photographers’ Agency. His works mostly reflects the concept of globalization; he is always interested in finding that undiscovered spot of a location, in photographing the outsider as well as the daily life of a place. Our next artist; Tobias Kruse is a photographer who works worldwide on personal artistic projects as well as on assignments for magazines, institutions and independents. He joined the photographer's agency Ostkreuz in March 2011. Since 2017 Tobias teaches photography at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie.

The Obscura Festival of Photography's Artist in Residence programme is a very significant programme for Penang. It is a programme to cultivate and sustain this cultural practise as it enables photographers to try and understand Penang and manage to create visual documents during the period. It has already been the fourth year collaborating between Obscura Festival and Hin Bus Depot, and the first for the residency programme. This programme is supported by Goethe-Institut Malaysia and @Cat Penang.

The Hin Bus Depot Artist Residency for dance in collaboration with JinnD Productions, supported by Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion and Carbon Artist Studio, presented a contemporary dance piece titled '守 SHOU' that drew inspiration from the stories of traditional artisans in the Butterworth area. This work was in progress and was intended to be performed as a final piece during the Butterworth Festival in November 2018.

The dancers involved in this project included: Lau Beh Chin (Jinn), Leo Yap, Matt Tan and Nurulakmal Abdul Wahid.