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BIOGRAPHY

Zarina Muhammad


Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound, moving image and participatory practice, she is interested in the broader contexts of ecocultural and ecological histories, myth-making, haunted historiographies, water cosmologies and chthonic realms. Her work has largely explored the role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends polyphonic voices to data-driven systems and shapeshifting worlds. She has been working on a long-term interdisciplinary project on Southeast Asia’s transmutating relationship to spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity, the social production of rationality and transcultural exchanges of knowledge.

Currently she is developing another long-term collaborative project on archival and speculative readings of the earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest. Forthcoming iterations of this audio-visual and text-based project will be presented in 2022.

She lives and works in Singapore.


ARTIST RESIDENCIES & NOMINATIONS FOR AWARDS
2021
Artist in Residence
136 Goethe Lab, Goethe Institute
Singapore

Finalist (Moving Image)
The Julian Baer Next Generation Art Prize 

2019
Artist in Residence︎︎︎ 
NTU-CCA
Singapore
 
Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize︎︎︎ 
Nominated by Claire Tancons for the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize. 48 international artists under the age of 40 are nominated by a group of 16 curators.

2018
President’s Young Talent︎︎︎
Nominated for the President’s Young Talent 2018 Award and Exhibition

2017
Artist in Residence︎︎︎
Extantation Chiang Mai
Thailand
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