Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Spectre System reimagines the spectral afterlives of plantation economies in the Malay Peninsula, a region shaped by the extractive logics of the British Empire. Developed through fieldwork conducted in a rubber plantation in Malaysia, the work is situated within a game-engine environment in which a computer-generated protagonist navigates a haunted plantation landscape. The character’s amplified breathing functions as a sonic index of corporeal exhaustion, registering the embodied effects of plantation regimes structured by racialised labour extraction. The narrative is mediated by the presence of the Inaivu—spectral orbs whose name synthesises the Tamil word ninaivu (நினைவு) and the Malay word ingatan, both meaning memory. This cross-linguistic construction situates memory as a transhistorical and diasporic force that persists within, and unsettles, the plantation’s spatial and temporal logics. Moving through the landscape, these figures function as carriers of suppressed histories, foregrounding how haunting and witnessing operate across colonial pasts and their contemporary continuities.
This tension extends in Mesh: Prelude to Spectre System (2024), a print of elongated, contorted arms suspended in mid-motion. Reflecting the elasticity of rubber, these hands blur the boundaries between body and environment. They gesture toward the ghostly residues of labour, mapping how its impact lingers across temporal, spatial, and material dimensions, imprinting itself onto the lived conditions of the present.
Single-channel video, (colour and sound), 15 min