Nadiah Bamadhaj: Surveillance

it is somewhat arbitrary to disassociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can be understood only through the other.

Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, and Power (1)


Nadiah Bamadhaj’s artistic practice over the past eight years forms an ongoing investigation into the structures which control and inform personal and national identities. She has taken on the vast territories of history, architecture and the built environment, landscape and memory, in a probing, critical approach which encompasses video, drawing, installation, sculpture and photography, always rooted within her own binary contexts of Malaysia and Indonesia (2).

The new body of drawing-based works in this exhibition explores the concept that architecture and the built environment can act as a form of political surveillance, having the potential to shape and control the individual or collective body, its movements, and in turn, the identity/ies located herein, looking specifically at the Malaysian example.

As is typical of her practice, Bamadhaj’s work proceeds here in the form of a considered argument, with a strong politicized, intellectual foundation, and is at the outset unabashedly polemical. However, while tightly framed, her artistic process and methodology allow for a measure of subjectivity and intuition that drag us into an emotive landscape. Surveillance does not merely seek to visualize a concept of environmental control, it manifests a struggle between state power and the body politic, between imposed structure and individual human response. The very position taken by the artist, and by extension the viewer, is a form of resistance – the object of scrutiny, the “surveyed” citizen, now takes on the role of “surveyor”, scrutinizing the mechanisms of state authority.


Discourses on Space and Power

The works in “Surveillance” form part of Nadiah Bamadhaj’s doctorate with Curtin University (3), and they propose a visual, artistic argument within her thesis, ‘Creating Critical Perspectives of Normalised Spaces in Malaysia’.

In her candidacy proposal, Bamadhaj states clear intentions:

“I will explore how built environments in Malaysia contribute to the practice and maintenance of state power. My central hypothesis is that certain built environments in Malaysia contribute to the classification of the population into specific groups, which correlate with communal and authoritative formations of government… These classifications are embraced as personal identities, which can be further understood as ‘national’ identities.

I would like to explore the concept that this process of classification, and the embrace of these classifications as identities, is a method by which the state enacts a form of surveillance upon the population. For if Malaysians are active in their self-formation, based on identities formed and reinforced by the state, this is a non-intrusive method by which the state keeps an eye on the population, towards the reproduction and reinforcement of its own formation of power.

The key component of these built environments is their being experienced and understood as symbols of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ in Malaysia. With the ease and comfort they provide, these built environments, the personal identities they reinforce, and the practices of surveillance that occurs, become normalised in the Malaysian experience.”

The scope of this body of work therefore operates at the outset within a specific framework, informed both by the evolution of her own experience and practice, and by readings of cultural theory, sociology and specific writings on her subject. It is structured, too, in a multi-faceted way, roughly in accordance with the ambit of her thesis, which selects three “sites” of study: Putrajaya, the Malaysian government’s administrative complex located 40km from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur; the PLUS Expressway, a privatised highway system that spans both North to South, and recently East to West of Peninsula Malaysia; and the proliferation of suburban terraced housing in and around the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. In more general terms: the architecture of the administration, the infrastructure of travel and communication, and the built environment of the urban population.

For this exhibition, the artist chooses to focus on two of these “sites” – suburban terrace housing and the structures of institutional power. The works bring together the identification of place, - in topographical and panoramic landscapes, housing and road plans, and human identity - in the form of portraiture. Her subjects are not analysed literally, although based on existing buildings and estates and actual persons; instead they express the idea of built environments as “forms of discourse”:

“Tim Bunnell…cites certain built environments in Malaysia as, ‘technologies of nationhood’. By this he means that they are key components in the construction of national identities, which are part of state discourse. Issues such as who was selected to design and build these environments, where they were constructed, in which culturally referential styles, and what would ultimately be represented in these environments, are part of state discourses on nationalism.” (4)

The idea of buildings and the environment as nationalistic statement has long been embedded in Bamadhaj’s work, and can be said to have underpinned much of her practice. A first, groundbreaking exhibition, 1965 – Rebuilding its Monuments (5) revisited a crisis point in Southeast Asian political history in an installation of charcoal drawings, plaster-cast sculptures and text. Here landscape and monument were used to create a symbolic space in which the forces of political agenda and rhetoric, statistics and commentary collided, and colluded, to engage us in a revaluation of the processes which create “history” and historical meaning.

Later, digitally-manipulated photography-based works would project iconic buildings and other structures into alternative spaces to provoke a reassessment of their socio-political agenda, and its implications for how we ‘locate’ ourselves or are ‘located’ in time and geography through the strategy of displacement. "147 Tahun Merdeka "(147th year of Malaysian Independence) (6) projects familiar local landmarks into the future, their functions realigned to suit a society which has developed according to a range of utopian, or nightmarish, trajectories. In the series “I Bestow This Upon You” (7), iconic Malaysian/Indonesian structures crop up in the remote and uninhabited hills of the Faroe Islands as monuments of “colonization”, implying a similar imposition of political agenda in their actual circumstances.

These earlier works invite us to see our environment from the outside, as abstract invented constructs, breaking familiarity to create a critical distance. “Surveillance” throws us back relentlessly into the here and now, positioned by “real” referents. In the case of suburban housing, “currently capital cities of Asia Pacific’s NIEs house between one-fifth and one-half of the population, (2005). Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding areas have flourished hundreds of square kilometers of housings estates, most visibly in the last 15 years. Most estates are semi-enclosed, contain numerically categorised streets, and row upon row of terraced housing.” (8) From the findings of her research, the spectre of surveillance, of the built environment as social conditioning in the Malaysian context, is extremely plausible and convincing, if invisible to the populace – a hidden “hand”, or “eye” constructing our life choices.

Precisely because of this “invisibility”, however, Bamadhaj chooses in these current works to return to the imaginative and metaphorical space allowed by the drawing medium. If our lives are real, the constructs imposed on us are abstract. It is also within her unique approach to drawing, involving the layering of material against an open, dream-like expanse, that Bamadhaj can best manipulate the trajectories of her ideas, and the abstract dynamics of socio-political agenda.

In “Surveillance” these dynamics are loosely expressed in a range of perspectival approaches, creating different measures of distance in which the viewer and the human subject become, at various degrees, complicit. These works make up different approaches to the “discourse” imposed by the physical architecture of the state, and if viewed conceptually, they may merely describe a politics of control. However, because that discourse operates within the imaginative space of an artistic argument, by nature subversive, and open to possibility, individual identity has room to react.


Portraits of Resistance

The works occupy an improbable frontier in the realm of imagery/representation, a grey zone of difference where nothing –neither identity, nor landscape, nor their ambivalent relationship -- can be settled.

One of the most striking forms of provocation in Bamadhaj's drawings is the image of her self-portrait wearing a songkok. The image made its first appearance in "Menelan Kejut, Termuntah Diam" (2006), and re-emerges here in two central works “The Island” and “Landlocked”. In the earlier work, the artist's torso is portrayed as part of a mountain landscape, wearing nothing but a songkok, staring out at the audience. This idea is further expanded in “The Island” and “Landlocked”, where the artist’s portrait is anchored into the topography of her built environment. Within the Malaysian context, this image is highly contentious and controversial. The songkok is synonymous with Muslim Bumiputera (9) male identity. This traditional headgear is used for formal wear, usually with baju Melayu, at religious and official events or festive occasions. This performative 'oppositional dressing' is perhaps one of the rare if unusual strident emotional acts of defiance she has intentionally communicated. The image demands attention and expects reaction. Her unwavering stare –bold and uncompromising, her 'nakedness' and gender more than upsets the loaded connotations of the songkok. The repositioning and recontextualising of this symbolic object in her work (and on her) places the artist in a direct offensive with convention. The underlying motive is to destabilize the monolithic system of representation. “By determining what is ‘normal’ in the Malaysian experience, built environments can also contribute to the determination of what is not. The practices of normalisation identify two anomalies in the social body. Firstly, those that do not actively identify with prescribed classifications, and secondly, those that openly critique these practices of state power".(10)

If we consider the artist's biography, her self-portraits become studies of alienation. This refusal of subservience is strongly connected to the artist's personal experiences of living in Malaysia and the complex social pressures of her particular situation. Of mixed parentage, with a Malaysian Muslim father of Arab descent and a mother born in New Zealand of Scottish descent, she is nonetheless expected to fit the more convenient and "normal" identity of a Malay/Muslim woman. It is a willful feminist stance - her portrayal in a songkok both refers to the racialisation of that identity and subverts it; the reality of who she is, the way in which she has chosen to live her life challenges the cultural stereotype and expectations of being 'a good Muslim woman' –“holding down a ‘respectable’ job, married with children, living in the suburbs”. She presses on in her pursuit to defy, simultaneously reflecting the reality of the identity impressed on her and re-imagining it to such an extent that its confining boundaries might crumble.

Surveillance: All the eye can see

The main body of work in this exhibition consists of four charcoal collages fusing the topographical and panoramic view of suburban housing estates into the human body and portraits of the artist.

The artist employs a number of 'lenses' in the composition of her images and in determining the viewing distance of each work. Our gaze, observing each scenario, echoes Orwell’s notion of surveillance as we assume the role of the "Big Brother", the unseen eye watching over our ‘subjects'. Bamadhaj’s viewfinder 'zooms out' to present an oppressive panoptic view in "Taman Impian Jaya" and "The Island", where she seamlessly combines the aerial map of Putrajaya (imagined as an island) with a frontal shot in the artist's profile in a single frame. The distance between the eye and its subject implies a sense of 'distancing' or 'othering'. "Semi-Detached" draws our view closer to the figure of a man, in supplication, aligned to the panorama of rows of terraced houses. “Landlocked” serves a twist to the Orwellian surveillance as the artist’s portrait in this instance becomes a ‘conscious subject’, observed and the observer, challenging the viewer. cf3

The cumulative process of collage, creating intricate layers of imagery and cartography, can be read as a cathartic act, allowing the artist to work through her personal memories and responses, as she tears, layers, digs into, and constructs details of suburban topography and the human form. The emotional resonance is palpable, particularly in her three self-portraits. In “The Island”, the first work in the series, the artist’s self-portrait appears estranged, but in parallel to the “island” of Putrajaya, connoting symmetry. The gap between two isolated entities in the vast grey ocean-like expanse implies anxiety, and the complex negotiation between body, space and institutional systems. She questions, "Who is the island? Putrajaya or me?" as she peers through the corner of her eye, uneasy, aware of the presence behind her, deliberately disassociating from this symbol of nationalist ideal, and the aspirations and expectations associated with it.

Bamadhaj delves deeper into the ambivalence about her unstable identity in "Landlocked" and "Taman Impian Jaya". Both portraits relate to the sociopolitical dimension in her work, questioning our reading and perception of identity –the way it is historically and culturally conditioned, and highlight the ‘disciplining’ of the social body by the state and society to restrict the body as a medium of expression and constrain it to act in particular ways. "Landlocked" is powerful in its epic scale. It critiques the role of (social) space in shaping national identity/ies, proposing the idea that the body is a ‘socially constructed object’ defined by social situations and culture. Wearing a songkok, she towers over her observers, statue-like, flaunting her apparent "otherness", her impassive clear-eyed gaze a portrait of resistance. Yet she is fixed within the very layers of the landscape she refuses to accept. This animate/inanimate state suggests atrophy of the body and the evanescence of life. In the ironically titled “Taman Impian Jaya” (“The Garden of Successful Dreams”), the dystopian image of the artist’s portrait is inlaid with the barren topography of South Puchong, a new suburban housing estate. With her eyes closed, her face becomes the naked terrain as she willingly allows herself to be mapped, charted and constructed. She is aware her identity is fixed, anchored or rooted to this built environment, forever confined within a physical site, an ideology.

A suite of four works – “2am”, “Rumah Tinggal Sarang Hantu, Orang Bujang Sarang Fitnah”, “Quiet on the Landing” and “Follow the Road”, create a stark, muted complement to this dark turbulence, turning our gaze inward to the inhabited space of suburban terraced housing. In each, a portrait of a man or woman is placed under a transparent layer on which is printed a generic cross-section or plan of a suburban house, or in the case of “Follow the Road” a plan of a housing estate. These works clearly express the aspect of her thesis which discusses a form of surveillance which “by dispersing the urban population into planned estates, streets, and housing ‘cells’, …is already performed in their ongoing regulation within these space” (11), or what Foucault calls ‘the spatial nesting of hierarchies surveillance’, where individuals become ‘embedded’ in spatial systems, which functions to ‘render the occupant visible’ (12).

Bamadhaj’s treatment of material reflects this dynamic – the transparent surface with its generic grid, or “spatial genotype” become the window of surveillance. The individual portraits, constructed of fine layers of erasure and collage are lightly defined with charcoal, ‘embedded’ in the white silence of their space but yet visible.

“I would argue that the ‘spatial genotype’ in Malaysian terraced housing reflects institutional knowledges on the functions of ‘family’, and the use of these spaces mediates and reproduces ‘given’ hierarchies within families.”(13)

So the terrace house is designed specifically to house a family unit, and within this, to reflect status within the family – marriage status, gender, age. A person’s hierarchised ‘role’ in family is enacted through and constructed by this space. He or she consequently identifies with it and surveillance continues through the individual’s subjectification to the identities ‘encoded’ within it. Bamadhaj argues further that such surveillance contributes to the maintenance of “family values”, which are in turn a means of maintaining state authority in Malaysia, providing a “home-made” unit of economic growth and dependence, while also contributing to social stability. “…the spatial sequencing of urban housing, in and around Malaysia’s cities, reinforces the normalisation of ‘family’ as the primary foundation of social life.” (14)

The works do not literally describe these hierarchies, rather they confront the imposition of “normalisation”. The portrayed subjects each project, subtly, a state of mind or feeling in relation to the map imposed on him/her, perhaps seen most clearly in “2am”, where a woman lies staring upward, with a plan of the upstairs sleeping quarters hovering above her. These subjects are not generic. Within the imaginative space of the work, a tension is created - between the two materials, between plan and identity, although they are layered one on the other. The title of “Rumah Tinggal Sarang Hantu, Orang Bujang Sarang Fitnah” is taken from a Malay saying, “An empty house is a haven for ghosts, an unmarried person is potential for slander”, implying that the female subject is “dangerously” single, like an “unoccupied” house. The work looks at the female place in the home, identifying this subject as an anomaly - “A rejection or critique of [normalized] identities, or the built environments that reinforce them, fall under the commonly used accusation of ‘un-Malaysian’. Therefore by contributing to the construction of identities, built environments also contribute to the process of ‘othering’ citizens." (15)

The greater part of this exhibition is centred around the politicized dynamics of suburban housing, the “surveyed” territory of the populace. Yet, at the end, it is anchored by two works which relocate us to the centre of power, to the architecture of the administration.

In two different depictions of the new Kuala Lumpur Court Complex, we are faced with the formidable façade of legal administration, staring out and over us, the subject(s). “In being all the eye can see, it is all that one perceives. Secondly, the unconscious surveillance lies in the subjectification that occurs.” (16) “An Exhibition” turns the lens onto the viewers as the building becomes the all-seeing eye, maintaining constant vigilance over its citizens, while the dome –the building’s ‘crown jewel’– emphasises the looming authoritative Bumiputera (Islamic)* presence. This delusion of grandeur begs the question: is this a citadel of power or monument of insecurity? As the title also suggests, “An Exhibition” can also be read as a way of ‘showing off’, an ostentatious display (of different architectural elements, arbitrarily merging Greek and British imposed Mogul styles in preposterous dimensions.) Irrespective of their origins, this somewhat absurd ‘fusion style’ with no specific Malay or Malaysian architectural references has ironically become synonymous with national complexes, the symbol of Malaysia’s national (Islamic) identity, reinforcing state policies of Islamisation.

“Udang di Balik Batu” (“the shrimp behind the stone”), taken from a Malay proverb signifying ‘there is a hidden motive behind an act’, provides a double-edged view of the complex. The blueprint of the Court Complex façade is laid on a transparent layer over the portrait of a man wearing a songkok with his back facing the viewer, his head growing out of a rocky landscape. As suggested by the proverb, the “stone” is the new face of legal administration, ostensibly guarding over the rights of the people (17). The figure in the back is the “shrimp”, “the motive” of an ulterior narrative. For Bamadhaj, he seems to represent “the establishment behind the façade, advancing the Bumiputera agenda” (18), protected by an institution which can be said to have become an ideological stronghold of government. At the end, the subject turns away from us behind a façade designed to impress, refusing our scrutiny.

Adeline Ooi & Beverly Yong
Kuala Lumpur, August 2008


NOTES