Valentine Willie Fine Art is pleased to announce the Nadiah Bamadhaj’s Solo Exhibition entitled Surveillance. The exhibition will run from 16th – 30th August 2008. Nadiah Bamadhaj’s art practice is predicated on a lifelong engagement with the political and historical forces that have shaped our cultural identities. This new body of work continues from her previous series investigating how built environments in Malaysia contribute to the practice and maintenance of state power. She argues that these are not neutral spaces and that they have moulded the population into specific groups, based on religion and ethnicity, so that the population fits into fixed and readily identifiable subjects in the multi-cultural rhetoric commonly understood as our ‘national’ identity.

Adopting the concept of surveillance, the artist zones into specific localities, in the guise of a sociologist or anthropologist, mapping the complex racial and religious ideologies that attend our different built environments. Each suburban estate is associated with a symbolic representation of a particular aspect of ‘national’ identity, shaped by local terrain. Their emergence in Nadiah Bamadhaj’s drawings inevitably reveal and expose the very structure that has perpetuated their presence in the way ethnicity and religion is understood, discussed and policed in Malaysia, commenting on how this has been subliminally embraced by the population.

These aerial and panoramic surveys of the broad and ever shifting transformation that development has wrought upon the Malaysian terrain reveal a nation grappling with the dark side of its post-colonial modernity and progress.

In Surveillance (2008), Nadiah Bamadhaj presented a series of drawing-based works that interrogated the built environment as a mechanism of social and political control. Rooted in her binary contexts of Malaysia and Indonesia, the exhibition functioned as a considered argument regarding how architecture shapes the collective body. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s premise that the “practice of freedom” cannot be dissociated from its “spatial distributions,” Bamadhaj examined the Malaysian landscape not merely as a neutral setting, but as an active form of surveillance.