Single-channel video, (colour and sound), 3:36 min
Curated by Fajrina Razak and Syaheedah Iskandar
Using a collection of images to formulate a digital archive for the future, Rite of the Time Teller is an introspection of gestures and practices passed down through ancestral, and everyday rituals within the Tamizh household. Existing as semidocumentary and semifiction, the work reimagines the repositories of connecting collective existence through Tamizh ancestral practices of knowing and being within Southeast Asia. To locate is to return; the living archive as an embodiment becomes a site of an imaginary continuum between the present and future.
The central figure is symbolic of a contemporary, mythological presentation of celestial divinities found in Hindu mythology. It demonstrates the uncanny contemplation of time through the imagery of the past, present, and the birth of the future cradled in an infant-like form. The tangibility in the ringing of the bell, the extension of the nails, and the gesture of the hands, mirror the fluidity of spatial temporality of the living archive on screen and in the physical installation.
