Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Faceless nude by Summaya Durrani, who did a series on the business of mail-order brides and how 'the oriental woman makes the perfect wife' . She is there to serve and to be served up. Farida Batool is also a young artist, and this work was to do with the ritual of birth . In a patriarchal society male children are of course very highly regarded and th is particular installation is on motherhood . The title of the work is They all have babies except one. To be childless is an even greater sin than not producing a male chil d . Faiza Butt i s a person who works tongue in cheek. She comments on the pregnant woman dreaming of the male ch ild . The other women are open ing the Koran to find out, open ing it to see if there is luck and whether it will be a male ch ild. Her work owes a lot to urban fol k forms of popular culture, like the cinema poster and truck art. This particular work of my own wh ich is called A poem for Zairab, is based on an incident in which a woman named Zairab was bad ly brutal ised by her husband, a Muslim cleric. Womanscape, the last slide, was part of an exh ibition wh ich had to do with an international conference for women . First year students got together and changed the space in wh ich the exhibition was conducted . This looks very simple but actually it's a woman lead ing other women in prayer, which is not allowed in Islam . The wall space was transformed by these images of women which were done by first year students - they used burlap soaked in plaster. Again I'll just say in conclusion that one of the poems by the eminent Pakistani poet Kashwar Naheed begins 'we sinful women' and the thing is that women artists still remain in the context of Pakistani art practice as the 'sinful women'. WORKING AS A WOMAN ARTIST AND MAKI NG PROJECTS WITH A FEMALE FOCUS Amanda Heng I didn't start making art from a young age. I had been working in the community for more than ten years before getting into art making. It was a conscious decision . Here I would like to share with you a little about the development of Singapore to g ive you an historical context. Singapore became independent in 1 965. Before that there were more than 1 50 years of British colonial influence. The country is made up of three major races, namely, Malay, Indian and Chinese. The Chinese make up 70% of the whole population and remain the majority race in the country. There are very strong links among the Ch inese with their homeland, China. Some made their fortune in Singapore and set up many Chinese schools to teach the Chinese language and cultural values to their children . I was sent to one of these schools and I was taught to be proud of my Chinese heritage. It was a cu ltural shock when I entered into the general community and found that what I had acquired in school could not help me function effectively in a society where English was the lingua franca. Since independence, the government has focused on economic development. We have experienced dramatic changes brought about by modernisation, industrial isation, science and technology, urbanisation , consumerism, and globalisation ; a l l in a very short period of thirty years. With the strong and authoritative direction of the government to pursue its financial status, moneymaking became our national obsession. The cultural aspect was largely neglected . Today we have a common feeling that we have been led to modernity without the experience of modernisation . The process of change has not been dealt with in our collective consciousness . It was in the '80s that I decided to quit my job and travelled to Europe to think about what I wanted to do with my life. I was looking for a language to express myself, to re-examine what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a woman in this fast-changing society. It was natural to begin the inqu iries with my body. I wanted to examine how history, culture and politics made their marks on the body. Performance art was chosen because it is about process. In focusing on the experience of changes, it is necessary to revisit the body in time and space, to red iscover the self. In the early '90s I had the chance to be informed of the women's movement, feminism, and its critical contributions to contemporary discourse . Feminism offers an alternative view t o phallocentric thinking . It opens up new possibilities and makes options available for women . Because I was informed of feminist theories I realised my 46