soultari   amin   farid

The critical question that I deal with in my artistic practice is, “How is the brown body a repository of ‘things’?”. The question stems largely from my experience as a brown-queer-minority-Muslim person living in Singapore. “Things” here refer to the ephemeral and variable attributes that continues to (re)shape the identity of a person. The interstices of negotiating identities and values are where my artistic practice lies.

Working methods for this project includes “autobiographical confrontation”; ethnography, performance studies research and play. Autobiographical confrontation here means placing myself (the body) in confrontation with some difficult memories of bullying, shame, failures and humiliation to tease some of the felt experiences of the body in the remembering.

My critical question here is “Where, when and how does the brown queer body negotiate the performative gender?”.  An initial phase of creation was presented first as a work presentation in Scope #3 in September 2018 and secondly as a work-in-progress Performance Lecture in October 2019. The two presentations were experimentation of presentation modes inherent in the creation process. 

My project Pok!" started in 2018-2019 as a creative research and experimentation on cross-gender performance. The word "Pok" is a corruption of the Malay word "Bapok", a derogatory term that is used to call a cis-male person who possesses female mannerisms and/or attributes such as a male transvestite or transgender.