Interrogating Arts Archives

The past three decades has witnessed a growing trend of the establishment of independent arts and cultural archives in Malaysia.  These archives range from personal collections and collective archives, to organisational repositories.  Often perceived as ‘informal' archives, they provide recognition for endangered or marginalised  creative works and practitioners that don’t make it into officially sanctioned public archives.

These bottom-up efforts provide us with the opportunity to revisit, investigate and reflect on individual and shared historical records on arts and cultural practices.  The archives can be useful in a number of ways – to commemorate, memorialize, interrogate history or identity, or they may be used as a form of activism or resistance, to inspire alternative, intellectual and creative activities . Engaging with these archives allow us to reimagine fresh dialogues and to create new meanings between the present and the past.

'Interrogating Arts Archives' brings together several of these archives for a conversation, to discuss and reflect on:

• the motivations behind their initiatives, and whose experiences, narratives, perceptions and stories are validated in their archives.
• their archival strategies and processes, and how their repositories have been used and expanded.
• how the community may be involved in shaping the archival processes.
• future directions and potential for the archiving of arts and culture in Malaysia.

Speakers:

1) Catriona Maddocks is an artist, curator, and researcher, originally from the U.K. and based in Sarawak for the past fifteen years. Her cross-disciplinary work focuses on collaborative platform-building and developing spaces in which to explore identity, community narratives, and cultural heritage within a contemporary context.  Catriona is the co-founder of social enterprise Catama, and co-curator of creative platform Borneo Bengkel.

2) Jac sm Kee is a feminist activist, writer and researcher.  She co-founded Malaysia Design Archive alongside designer Ezrena Marwan.  Jac is also a co-founder of the global and collaborative Take Back the Tech! campaign, which aims to combat digital gender violence by empowering women to take back control of technology, as well as the Numun Fund, the first feminist tech fund for and from the Global South.

3)  Joe Kidd is a writer, designer, underground music activist, and youth subculture archivist. One of the pioneers of the punk subculture in Malaysia, he has been actively involved in the country’s underground music scene since its nascent beginnings.  He plays guitar for one of the oldest Malaysian punk bands, Carburetor Dung.

Moderators:

4) Fasyali Fadzly is an educator, director, playwright and writer. He is currently serving as the Dean for the Theatre Faculty at The National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage of Malaysia (ASWARA).  He is an MFA graduate from University of Calgary, Canada, and is a researcher on MY Art Memory Project.

5) Janet Pillai is an independent consultant and resource person specialising in arts education and community engaged arts. She researches and publishes on community-based arts in the Asian region, designs programmes, and provides training for community arts workers in the region.  She is lead researcher for Arts Education Archive Malaysia.

This event is supported by Yayasan Sime Darby, and is organised in conjuction with the launch of GMBB.