On 27 June 2024, the Fellowship team visited Shooshie at the temporary unit she is renting in Kuala Lumpur to house the artworks, materials and archives taken from the former 12 Art Space as she works towards restoring the original space (see: termites).
The first item to be pulled out from the large collection of boxes were a series of banners.
Her collection of banners featuring former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin was not a deliberately thought-out act, especially when she recovered them in the storage of the former 12 Art Space, not understanding why she collected them in the first place. Her recollection was mostly in the fact that Muhyiddin Yassin, who was the 8th Prime Minister of Malaysia during a short tenure from 2020 to 2021, appointed during the COVID-19 pandemic, was from Muar. Known for his “fatherly” nature, Shooshie was taken with the idea that he was publicly known by his nickname, “Abbah”. The word originates from West Asia and is borrowed by the Malay language to call fathers. Other words for fathers include ayah, bapa, papa.
In Shooshie’s observations, Malaysian’s election campaigns tend to produce an excessive amount of campaign collaterals in the forms of posters, flags and banners. In recovering these banners, she thought about how to repurpose them in functional ways (beyond politicking), eventually settling into tote bags.
The act of unpacking these boxes with curators at present became a new module Shooshie she calls Witness of Objects, which prompted a more serious look at how Shooshie as an artist and art space owner wanted to archive what she had amassed over the years through 12 Art Space. It is an opportunity to sift through the boxes, sort out materials, return and re-home artworks and objects, and like the tote bags, repurpose what she already has on hand. More importantly, Shooshie taken this a chance to sit down with everything she has and write its histories from start to finish, as she remembers it.
