Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: South-East Asian Connections: Art, History, and Archipelagos
Faith in the Unknown
Thursday, April 16, 2026, 6:30pm
Anissa Rahadiningtyas, National Gallery Singapore
In 1992, a prominent Malaysian artist, Sulaiman Esa (b. 1941, Malaysia), prompted a series of questions with an emphasis on what would determine the artist’s “Islamicity” in the conventions of “Islamic art”. Artists like Ahmad Sadali (1924-1987, Indonesia) and A.D. Pirous (1932-2024,Indonesia), whose works and practices have been positioned comfortably as pioneering in the development of modern Islamic art in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, posed the same question as they were thinking about their calligraphic modernist works. A similar conceptual thread drawn from their responses consequently emerged and was institutionalized: “Islamic art” adheres to Islamic principles and is an expression of spirituality and ethics as a “good” Muslim. Its visual manifestations traditionally revolve around a balanced tension between global and localized languages of abstraction, calligraphy of Quranic phrases, infusing Arabic and Jawi scripts.
This presentation seeks not to dwell in this canonized moment, but rather to destabilize and rethink the established categorical boundaries of “Islamic art” through the works of a later generation of artists: Arahmaiani (b. 1961, Indonesia), Shooshie Sulaiman (b. 1973, Malaysia), and Zarina Muhammad (b. 1982, Singapore). Rarely framed within the discourse of Islamic art, their practices often resist straightforward perceptibility, legibility, or translation — further challenging the modern insistence on knowing and categorizing the world. Drawing from the histories, rich storytelling traditions, rituals, and performances rooted in island Southeast Asia, their works blur and dissolve distinctions between different worlds. These practices possess the capacity to disorient and remain elusive, yet they simultaneously offer alternative ways of understanding — making space for uncertainties and modes of knowledge-making that involve human, non-human, and more-than-human.
Anissa Rahadiningtyas is a curator of Islamic Aesthetics in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia at the National Gallery Singapore. She is the co-convenor for the Art History Minor program at the National University Singapore and co-developed a course on Islam and modern and contemporary Southeast Asia with Syaheedah Iskandar. She received her PhD in art history from Cornell University with a dissertation on the making of modernity in Islam and art in post-colonial Indonesia. Her research interests include comparative modernisms, Indian Ocean studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender and feminism, environmentalism, and Islamic studies.
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