Slide 1

Material and Multicultural Histories of arts collectives in urban centres of Malaysia

Or rather that actual title: To counter cultural state infrastructure – To build Arts Collectives

This presentation broadly reexamines the role and definition of cultural infrastructure (state led, and beyond) in a nation-state. Arts collectives is simply a medium to discuss these larger notions of embeddedness in the everyday encounters of our communities, cultural production and what our cosmopolitanism is contingent on, in the post-colonial worlding of Malaysia. In a state of formation and reformation through the plurality of cultures Malaysia embodies, an inkling of cosmopolitanism ambitions sprinkled in there. I come from a hybrid southeast Asian art history and architectural background, so don’t mind me as I mediate between different disciplinary traits.

Slide 2

This paper questions the relationship between culture and capital and reads into the uneven urban planning and densification of urban centres of the cosmopolitan imagination of Malaysia.  through the lens of interstitial gaps where I argue that arts collectives infill on existing state-led cultural infrastructure through forms of building the social fabric of a cosmopolitan civil society.

Slide 3

On the horizon, reflected by a photographer in Titiwangsa Lake north of the city centre and the end stop of the monorail, surrounded by embassys are two cultural stately buildings. Built in the 1990s under the Dr. Mahathir’s reign under the Vision 2020 futuristic imagination of Malaysia, the blue-green hue of pitched roofs set in symmetry is the National Visual Art Gallery (Balai Seni Negara) and the Palace of Culture (Instana budaya). These are two cultural infrastructure set in a futuristic cosmopolitanism ambitions, is simply an attempt to bring encounters with art with the general public.

Located at the edge of the city centre, with some residential areas but not connected to any directly, these two buildings are not embedded in communities. Instead, I turn to towards thinking through cultural infrastructure as an expanded network of relations, a Sunitha Janamohanan writes, “working from conditions” approach outside of government-led cultural statecraft and to land earnestly in a decolonial worlding of a resettling civil society.

Slide 4

Through this project, I pose a question about how to expand the notion of cultural infrastructure, and if arts collectives is a possibility through two scales: The neighbourhood and the building.

My talk will be segmented into two parts: One is the first step to considering cultural infrastructure distribution and the role of cultural policy in what mark teh  ‘systemic rot’, and a methodological foray into discovering the ecologies of material construction of arts collectives

But first, what are arts collectives?

• We will be looking at two today: Little Giraffe Story House and

Slide 5

• COEX at Kilang Besi, in georgeotown, penang

Slide 6

• Yap Sau Bin defines arts collective to have four major concerns regarding the arts collective practice, including conceptions of context, arts, methods and site. It is a often non-hierachical, organisational culture with a strong bonds of friendship and shared interest. They are often not market-oriented, and develop systems of governance and keep each other accountable. Art historians often describe the aesthics of a socially engaged arts practice, but I like to take theatre practitioner Mark Teh’s reading of “unlearning, decolonising and repairing institutions and psychologies from decades of systemic rot; creating and maintaining spaces for new articulations, possibilities and reimaginings of the futures and histories of the ‘nation- thing’

Amongst these ambitions,