To gain password acess to the works linked below please contact nrajah@sfu.ca
I am happy to note that Jane Frankish has had her essay, Chennai, a place in between, published in the Liberal Studies Journal ,Simon Fraser University hosted within the Ormsby Review. This short piece tells the story of our family’s migration from Malaysia to Canada through the lens of a visit to Tamil Nadu we made on route.
https://ormsbyreview.com/category/sfu-graduate-liberal-studies/
https://ormsbyreview.com/
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I will be presenting my Koboi Balik Kampung series of the Koboi Project at Percha Art Space in Lumut over the Christmas and New Year period. The show, titled Dari Pusat Tasek, will open on 25th Dec and run for 2 weeks. Koboi Balik Kampung presents a very personal perspective on the complexities of contemporary Malaysian art and society. It explores the notion of returning home from the diaspora, but also interrogates this idea in terms of the complex relationship between nationality and ethnicity. It was conceived in the course of my visit to Malaysia for Aliran Semasa {RearView Forward}, a series of events curated by Roopesh Sitharan in June and July, 2013. The images were gleaned from my activities in Kuala Lumpur and its surroundings. The titles delve deep into the Malay idioms and expressions. The series was mainly shot by my daughter Durga Rajah who was my constant companion on this trip.
The Koboi Balik Kampung (2013) Readymade from the permanent collection of the National Visual Art Gallery in KL is currently on display at the gallery. This item was a residual artifact from a performance at the Aliran Semasa symposium held at the gallery in 2013. This performance marked my Malaysian homecoming after ten years away in Western Canada.
I appeared at the event wearing a brand-new Rockmount Western shirt with tags intact. As the symposium began, my mother the late Sathiavathy Deva Rajah was invited on stage, to give me a traditional Indian/ Hindu blessing by placing chanthanam (sandalwood paste) and kunggumum (red turmeric powder) on my forehead. Then, facing the audience, I remove the shirt, draped it on a pre-installed hanger at the back of the stage and my mother consecrated it with the same chanthanam and kunggumum. The shirt was left hanging for the duration of the symposium and then presented to the gallery.
A version of the Performance was repeated in an intervention when the item was on show for the first time as a selection from the collection of the National Visual Art Gallery in 2018. My Mother and I were stopped from renewing the markings on the shirt by a curator and a conservator from the gallery. We debated notions of completion of an art work, ownership of an artwork, the artist’s rights to modify an artwork, the extensive conservational bureaucracy that encompases a work of art in a National collection and the effects of all of these on the state of an art work (is it active or is it inert, alive or dead!). Mother and I proceed with the portion of our ritual that did not interfere with what is now the property of the gallery. The image above was captured by my daughter Durga Rajah during this performance.
Updated on March 29th 2021:
With reference to the recurrent controversies around the use of the term ‘keling’, and with particular reference to the recent Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) inclusion of the word “keling” in its definition of “tambi,“ there is no need for hysterical reaction from Indians about the presence of the word Keling in the Malay lexicon and publications in the Malay Language. After all if Indians think about it carefully, ‘thambi’ itself is problematic, as it can reflect status, class and cast when used to refer to adults. In fact it is far more troubling that we use the word ‘pariah‘ as a put-down in English as well as in Malay with scant criticism. However, it reveals an extremely poor standard of scholarship and professionalism on the part of the DBP that they have used the term ‘keling’ as an index for ‘Indian’ in the contemporary setting. Yes, this failure to recognize that the main contemporary usage of of the term is to put Indians down, might even reflect a systemic (unconscious) racism in the esteemed authority in whose care we have put the future of the Malay Language.
Telinga Keling (1999) is in the collection of the National Visual Art Gallery in KL. It is currently (oct 15 2019) on display again in a selection from the collection. ‘Keling’ is a today taken as a derogatory term for ‘Indian’ although, from its etymology, it is clear that this was not always so. The items obscuring my ears in the image are Malay sweets which are colloquially referred to as ‘Telinga Keling’ (Indian Ears). More formally and publicly, given our multi-racial Malaysian society, these cakes are referred to as ‘penyaram’ or ‘denderam’. Ironically, this Telinga Keling sweet is quite likely to be of Indian origin. My mother used to make something that tastes exactly the same that we call it ‘athirasam’
The idea of the piece is that I can engage the Malay viewers regarding this juncture of ‘sweetness’ and ‘derision’ while excluding the others, who would likely be unfamiliar with the cake’s colloquial name. Of course, there’ll be some Indians who know, particularly those from Kelantan where the sweet is prevalent, but empirically speaking, during the opening of its inaugural exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, the Indians had no idea and kept asking, ‘Why did you insult yourself in this work? ’, The Malays, however, smiled at me in and nodded in awkward acknowledgement.
https://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ramasamy-tells-dbp-remove-racist-020100995.html
The Koboi Project 
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