“The passage of time since 2020 has amplified a sense of a ‘dead end’, of abrupt stops and having to remain still for a moment on an individual and collective level. Possibly, we have hurtled through spaces in which opportunities to unlearn, relearn, and dwell in the process of re-renegotiating notions of habitat, safety, belonging, isolation, grief, community, inequity, precarity, care, and survival arose.”

Working at the intersections of performance, mixed media installation, text, sound, moving image, and participatory practice, Zarina becomes a cultural ventriloquist for South-east Asian communities and natural and supernatural entities. Much of her art involves themes of traditional South-east Asian mythology and folklore, liminal spaces, otherworldly themes, the supernatural, and natural elements.

“Reading and imagining beyond the margins of the page was something encouraged by my parents from a young age. I must credit them for creating space for these curiosities and peculiarities I displayed as a child,” she says.

She uses organic materials, archival and found objects, textiles, and scent and sound-producing instruments. They include a mirror, amulets, a paper tiger, a geomancer’s mirror, batik, bamboo, incense, a prayer bell, rocks, seashells, herbs, spices, books, and picture cards.

Across South-east Asia, varying hues of animistic, folk-religious beliefs, and polycosmologies continue to contribute to the vastly heterogeneous forms of spiritual practices. These questions inform and motivate aspects of my work.

Through her art, she challenges our attempts to define belief systems, words, concepts, and practices connected to the otherworldly. “How can we claim to know what is unseen? What can we make of these myths and beliefs as discursive fields of dynamic cultural relationships?”

As someone who has faced multiple health crises growing up and in her adulthood, Zarina says Talismans for Peculiar Habitats is her most personal work.

“This installation contains personal mementoes, handwritten notes, sculptural works, effigies, shrouds, talismanic textiles, trays of offerings, and other ritually performed gestures, alongside a video of seascapes and spiritscapes. It traces tangential points in my life marked by health crises, grief, mourning, dematerializing and remaking home, forming communities of care, and finding refuge in the unexpected kindness of strangers,” she says.

In 2019, it debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei as part of the exhibition Stories We Tell to Scare Ourselves With curated by Jason Wee. A digital version appeared in SCENES by Drama Box in 2020, and a reconfigured version was presented at Between the Living and The Archive, a 2021 exhibition at Gillman Barracks. National Gallery of Singapore’s lecture-performance Love Loves Difficult Things this year featured aspects of the installation.

“The varying incarnations of this work were always meant to offer a glimpse into the ineluctably peculiar ways in which we form webs of kinship, how we are bound to or avert the burdens of bloodlines, and how we make, break, and locate found families and the traditions that mark the transitions into the afterlife. I now understand health crises and discomfort as portals for skin shedding and transformation.”

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During the last two years, Zarina’s work has attempted to address how communities of care, mutual aid, and kinship can be sustained. Throughout her practice, she challenges colonial epistemologies and thinks alongside cross-cultural flows. She also reflects on the ways we can talk about and listen to knowledge as it is produced, transmitted, consumed, perpetuated, handed down orally, visually conjured, represented, documented, decontextualized, stolen, subjected to gatekeeping, or held with love, gentleness, and renewal.”

Her mixed media installation Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Eating Soil — now on exhibition at St John’ Island as part of the Singapore Biennale until March next year — invites participants to reorientate themselves to unmapped spaces by following nine mythical archetypal symbols. The Guide, The Witness, The Wrathful Deity, The Pyramidal Cell, The Gate, The Peculiar Habitat, The Rotating Naga, The Talisman, and The Pragmatic Prayer are presented as a diorama of directional signs, palimpsests and constellations.

“Walking, re-sensing and re-experiencing any cityscape beyond the current parameters of the built environment can help reorientate our senses to the multivocal nature of socio- ecological memories of place histories that might have been left in footnotes, marginalia, fragments of hand-me-down knowledge, folklore, and forgotten archival images,” she says.

Zarina also often collaborates with other artists on installations that look at multisensory ways of wandering and walking, and how we can be more attentive and respectful when moving through any space.

“Any space we inhabit will inevitably be brimming with layers and layers of history bearing imprints of violence, legacies of trauma, survival, thriving life across human, and non-human as well as more than human worlds,” Zarina claims, arguing that art allows us to to walk in non-human dimensions.

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