For the performance at Kapallorek on August 5th 2023, Koboi worked again with his collaborator for Dari Pusat Tasek, Sang Nabil Utama. Nabil and Koboi raised the SUPERSTAR banner, which depicts Malaysia’s current Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim. This was followed by an acknowledgement of the jinns and giants of the land, the initiation of two new wayang kulit puppets – the Pokok Pauh Janggi and the Ketam Gergasi, made following designs from the late 19th Century. The performance was followed by a poetry performance by Hamzah Yazd and an artist talk locating the event within traditional Malay ontology and epistemology as well as within the social, historical and political concerns of Contemporary Malaysia.

Two additional readymade  works are presented in the Installation – one is a small enamelled urinal, titled Air Abang Salleh (circa 2013), and alludes to Salleh Joned’s critique of Reza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’s Mystical Reality (1974); the other, titled The Appearance of a Fact ataupun Batu Kasih Piyadasa (circa 2017) refers to Reza Piyadasa’s A Fact Has No Appearance (1977) and is wooden icon belonging to my late mother at the feet of which she had placed a stone brought back for her by Reza Piyadasa from the shores of Sri Lanka when he returned from his first trip to the land of his ancestors.

Biography

Niranjan Rajah is a photo-performance artist and pioneer of Malaysian new media art. He made the first Southeast Asian Web work, The Failure of Marcel Duchamp/ Japanese Fetish Even! (1996), and also co-developed E-Art ASEAN (1999) the first regional portal for electronic art. This contribution was acknowledged in a two-person retrospective titled ‘Relocations’ at the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA),Singapore (2018). The significance of his practice to Southeast Asian art has been recognized in exhibitions such as ‘Rupa Malaysia,’ National Visual Arts Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, (2001) and ‘Intersecting Histories,’ School of Art, Design and Media Gallery, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, (2012). His early photo-performative work, Telinga Keling (2000) sits in the collection of the National Art Gallery of Malaysia. Niranjan’s ongoing photo-performative Koboi Project has been exhibited at the Fergana Art Gallery, Penang (2015), the National Art Gallery of Malaysia (2016), the Kuala Lumpur Biennale (2017), the Aga Khan Diamond Jubilee Festival, Lisbon (2018), the Courtyard Hiroo Gallery,Tokyo (2018), the Bangkok Biennale (2018), the Burning Man Festival, Black Rock City (2017), the Percha Artspace,  Lumut (2019), and the Singapore Biennale (2016). The Koboi Project Blog is at http://koboiproject.com/