Intan Rafiza
SEMUKA | Faccia a faccia
Bendera | Bandiera
is a new and ongoing series of Face to Face – SEMUKA, a project the artist initiated in 2016. The basis of Face to Face – SEMUKA is founded upon the artist-audience dialogue and examines social and political issues via the medium of performance art.
This Bendera | Bandiera performance constitutes a dialogue with the audience about the understanding and the meaning of the flag in different contexts and situations. For this period of residence, the artist took an opportunity to develop a new performance work about sharing a recent important event that occurred in Malaysia: the historical change of government which brought a new political party to power after 61 years, and its impact on rebuilding a new Malaysia. The performance responds to this situation by reimagining it using the patches of a flag with the symbols of political parties that ran for the last election, with an installation of 200 empty flags inviting the audience to create their own.
Intan Rafiza (b. 1981) is a curator and artist. Graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia, her art pieces are complete within performance art. Practicing performance art for the past 14 years, her artworks reflect and respond to the socio-political situations, locally and internationally. Taking the bold step of creating performance art as expression and medium in an environment that is unfamiliar with contemporary art and with no commercial values in galleries, her works express themes of self censorships in a religiously political situation in Malaysia. Her performance pieces were exhibited most notably at Asiatopia Conference SE Asia, Bangkok, Thailand, 2016; 5th Beyond Pressure Festival, Myanmar, 2012; and I’m Not Here, Nor There (in collaboration with Malaysia Indonesian & Japan Artist), Kuala Lumpur National Arts Gallery, Malaysia, 2004. Currently she is working on her performance art series SEMUKA- Face to Face.
Final Performance: June 28, 2018 | 7 pm
Duration: 20 min.
Ph. © Giulio Boem