Past & present lives of ______ : re-locating and imagining Malay womenhood

• Main Author: Dyan Hidayat Ismawi
• Other Authors: Ang Song Nian
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Visual arts and music::Photography
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/78015
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Past and Present Lives of _____ began with me wanting to recreate visions of my own past lives. These visions are imagined through re-locating narratives of women of the Nusantara (Malay archipelago) that may have been forgotten but still resonant within recesses of collective memory. This paper will first begin through a reframing of womanhood with Halberstarm’s proposition of queer time and place then followed with definitions of both ‘Malay’ and the ‘Nusantara’. Specific mentions of regional womanhood that have contributed to my research will also be made. Moving forward to the image-making process, this paper will also look at my reconciliation with my own ideas of photographic portraiture with the violence of colonialism. This will result in looking at regional specific ways of image-making beyond just photography.