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Fyerool Darma’s elegantly cacophonous practice—which spans video, painting, sound, text, sculpture and installation, as well as a growing panoply of craft techniques—is concerned with asking questions about and making sense of life, both online and offline, in a techno-tropical postcolony that is both beautiful and dystopian. The artist weaves together comedy and critique, and examines the interconnections between aesthetics and politics at the local (Singapore) level, as well as in regional (Southeast Asian) and global (contemporary) contexts. He has presented works at the Singapore Biennale (2016) and Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023), as well as at major museums in Australia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States, and at galleries and fairs in the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Fyerool’s work is held in major private and public collections across Southeast Asia, including at the Singapore Art Museum. He lives and works in Singapore.
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Installation View: To A Faraway Friend: Beyond Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities, 2 July—2 October 2022, ASEAN Culture House, Busan, Republic of Korea
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4. A SOUND
Often, the internet is the arena in which the artist sees different historical moments converging and merging, like the threads of warp and weft, or like the tunes of melody and harmony. Fyerool describes online discussions of historical phenomena (such as the failed Cold War-era Maphilindo proposal) as “not an echo but more like a reverb.” ⁸ The artist’s chosen metaphor is rich and complex. In sonic terms, an echo trails after an initial sound, and diminishes in intensity over time; an echo is a naturally occurring phenomenon. By contrast, reverb contemporaneously accompanies whatever sound it embellishes, adding a richness and fullness that is electronically produced and can resonate for as long as desired. Fyerool’s suggestion that history when discussed on the internet becomes “not an echo but more like a reverb” implies that online chatter—which is often anonymous and deterritorialised—can be understood as a living force that does not follow after history but instead participates in and makes it.
As well as being durational, Fyerool’s practice is tirelessly collaborative. The full title of Poietics lists all the many individuals and collectives who helped the artist make the work; throughout Poseur, Fyerool’s collaborators are credited in a looping scroll of text. These gestures decentre the artist and honour his creative interlocutors and co-labourers; they highlight a communal approach to making.
The artist’s interest in collaborations extends from the way he chooses to make work to the stories he chooses to research. Speaking about the Kitschmensch spacesuit with its geopolitical references to the optimism of decolonisation in the face of the Cold War, Fyerool says: “I was really inspired by this idea of the collective moment in that period also where states…within Southeast Asia [were] working towards independence.” ⁹ Similarly, writing about the place of poetry in contemporary culture, he affirms that “Pantuns no longer belong to a specific community, like other remixed things.” ¹⁰ For Fyerool, the collectivity of the moyang or ancestors guides and graces collaborative approaches to contemporary artistic practice today. -
5. A Void
Kitschmensch with many failed flags of 1963 Maphilindo Confederation (Reworked) [featuring Tasyo, Nyai Ontosoroh, Efund, tatteredemalion and Exoducks and Manni Wang], 2021- 2023One of the first works which won Fyerool acclaim in Singapore was The Most Mild Mannered Men (2016), commissioned for the Singapore Biennale. The installation comprises two plinths. On one sits a sculpted bust of a British white man named Stamford Raffles; the other plinth is empty, save for the inscribed name of a local leader, Sultan Hussein Mua’zzam Shah. Together, these two men signed a treaty which led to the founding of modern Singapore; in most historical accounts, however, Raffles is given much greater prominence than Sultan Hussein.
The Kitschmensch spacesuit—which is anthropomorphic in form, yet empty—brings this earlier work to mind. Like The Most Mild Mannered Men, this ambitious new work juxtaposes an anthropomorphic presence with an absence, a void. The presence of a figure shows us the absence of a body. Seeing that we still prize space travel (and Raffles), we realise that we have discarded the utopian dream of Maphilindo (and the legacy of Sultan Hussein). For Fyerool, the formal juxtaposition of presence and absence dramatises the conceptual interplay between remembering and forgetting.
Two centuries ago, Munshi Abdullah composed a pantun, which opens with the following lines:
Of what avail a coloured dressIf the pattern’s ill designed? ¹¹
Fyerool Darma offers no answers, only more questions. Within the emptiness lies cacophonous possibility.
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Dr. Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a recurrent concern with questions of historiography and method. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore. He was the 2022 recipient of the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, and is currently working on a book about artistic art histories. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a scholarly journal published by NUS Press. Roger has worked with Fyerool Darma on commissions for exhibitions at National Gallery Singapore (2022), ADM Gallery at Nanyang Technological University (2023), and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (2024). Roger’s essay on art and literature in Southeast Asia, which centres on Fyerool’s work, is forthcoming with Routledge (2024).
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¹ Fyerool Darma, “Fyerool Darma,” interview by Roger Nelson, in Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, ed. Charmaine Toh (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2022), 272–273.
² Ibid.
³ Karin G. Oen, “My Own Words: Cosmopolitanism as Pandemic Response,” Art & Market, 1 October 2020. https://artandmarket.net/analysis/2020/10/1/my-own-words-cosmopolitanism-as-pandemic-response-karin-oen [accessed October 2023].
⁴ Wong Bing Hao, “Fyerool Darma: Another Day in Paradise?” Frieze, 5 July 2019. https://www.frieze.com/article/fyerool-darma-another-day-paradise [accessed October 2023].
⁵ Munshi Abdullah [Munsyi Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir], The Hikayat Abdullah [1849], trans. A.H. Hill, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (171) (June 1955): 81-82.
⁶ See, for example, the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Syed Hussein Alatas, Kuan-Hsing Chen, and many others.
⁷ See: http://afrosoutheastasia.com/ [accessed October 2023].
⁸ “Artist Interview with Fyerool Darma,” Konnect ASEAN, 13 October 2022. https://www.konnect-asean.org/resources/to-a-faraway-friend-artist-interview-with-fyerool-darma/ [accessed October 2023].
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ “Fyerool Darma” in Living Pictures.
¹¹ Munshi Abdullah, “Hikayat,” 78. https://ia800304.us.archive.org/27/items/autobiographyofm00abdu/autobiographyofm00abdu.pdf
Fyerool Darma at ASIA NOW Paris Asian Art Fair: by Roger Nelson
Past viewing_room
