Kemahuan is one of four paintings in the Cow dan Aku series (All photos: Sesuatu yang Something)
Entah Apa. Apa Entah is translated by artist Binti, referring to her collage, a pastiche of bits from previous works strewn, discarded and archived — as “nonsense”. Except that her translation eludes the proper allusion; the expression tends, more, towards the suspended, “Who knows what it is, really? Who knows?”
Suspension — moral, attitudinal, biographical — permeates much of her work, Entah Apa. The mononym Binti, meaning simply, “daughter of”, may add further to the opacity, even openness, of what constitutes a tentative search for (her) self.
The choice of mononym reflects this, especially. Binti has said, “I used to think that it appealed to me, as it could stand for me being every woman. I think of it as just a name”. From point of purpose — “every woman” — to the wistful, perhaps even banal, “just a name”. Even in self-description, the artist as the always tentative.
The quandary for a purposefully autobiographical artist — or, as Binti declares herself, a “diarist” — is creating that fine balance between the ponderous and the open-ended. Self-deprecation, a certain innocence of introspection, a quirkiness and humour — all the virtues of the latter — salvage the work of Binti from falling into the former, which is the all-too-common signing of the proverbial death sentence for any artist — “taking yourself too seriously”.
There is much also that exudes a sense of the “retrospective” in her first solo exhibition, delightfully titled Sesuatu yang Something, that lends it an infectiousness. The title is emblazoned in a series of embossed letters forming a quatrain:
sesuatu yang something
tiada siapa yang nobody
seseorang yang someone
tiada apa yang nothing
offering a tease reminiscent of Yoko Ono. Not surprising for an artist who falls back on prosody to thread a work — “jazz, blues, poetry”, as she explains — the “sesuatu yang something” jives so well with the word patterns of the gospel, soul R&B artist Billy Preston:
Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’
You gotta have somethin’ if you wanna be with me
he sings in his classic Nothing From Nothing.The emblazoned words, in embossed letters, offer some foundational insight into how the “multidisciplinary artist” works. Craft, the picking up and working on a skill — in this case, embossing.
“Often, I want to use something and I have to learn it then apply it: I prefer that to applying what I already know,” Binti offers. “With embossing, you must apply just the right pressure or it will press too heavily,” she adds, pointing to a “y” with a slight indent.
Sesuatu yang Something is a moving and clever mise en scène — a careful arrangement of memories, imaginings, autobiographical reflections and collective desires.
A cast of characters, from family and ancestors, to random mouths with their lips daubed, in a wall-length work warmly titled Adult Lovesong cohabit to produce a kind of world — of wonder, longing, desire and a whimsical “randomness”.
It is in this randomness that there is a falling back on the recurrent sense of “entah apa” — what is this, really? — of self, of others, of world.
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Perhaps the most striking illustration of this randomness is the wielding of playing cards as an arching theme, with the artist Binti as the one that stands apart, if not the principal character in this allegory. By her own hand, she is the joker in the pack, as is featured in the work Finally Potrait — an assemblage of family members identified only by their home names.
The tension between the “what-is-expected” that emerges from a certain conservatism of expectation and the embarked “radical choice” into a life of making art is brazen in the sardonic, yet inviting, Funemployee, featuring the artist in a series of zany occupations for every month of the year. My month — October — was the threatening “Doctor”. “It’s funny,” Binti says. “Many people approach this work as if it were an astrological chart.”
For all the intimacy that is obvious in Sesuatu yang Something, it is a series of four paintings titled Cow dan Aku that delves into that most mysterious aspect of self — the nature and fate of desire. Paintings with intricate collages and pastiches contained within them, emblazoned with entreaties and declarations, impress in their ability to create within each work complicated internal dramas of real and imagined desire.
Complication — of being and ancestry — is one of the more obvious reaches in Binti’s sensibility and aesthetic. And the derisive “entah apa” comment from an aunt in response to an early artwork, art appears to have emerged as an act of digging — into the self, ancestry, into the “why” of art itself. It seems in the works that art is, for her, an act of reclamation.
This shadows the series Main Main, perhaps the most evocative and intriguing of the works featured in Sesuatu yang Something. Employing another favoured medium — photography — in a search for family and ancestry, she discovers that “my paternal lineage was well photographed: but my maternal lineage — Indian — was not. I had photographs of my grandparents on my mother’s side but nothing beyond that”.
Main Main, then, features photographs set against the frame of an UNO card, where Binti employs the contentious medium of artificial intelligence (AI) to imagine her ancestry.Its effect is impressive — a self-stitching of representations of a physical lineage of blood imagined.
“We are the best of us when we remind ourselves of how complex and complicated we are,” she says.
In an earlier interview, she declared: “One thing I was told when I was just starting to attempt a creative career is that ideas are like a wet bar of soap: fragile, easily moulded out of shape and very slippery. It has stuck with me to this day.”
And for all the certainty that exists in Sesuatu yang Something — a seductive and confident first solo show — there is an obvious restiveness that still seems to haunt, the unresolved tension between “career” and the “creative”. Rather than pressure, in this exhibition, that tension is taut and productive; surely a reassurance that for all its popular “uselessness”, there is still utility and a particular way of looking at the world in the search it affords.
'Sesuatu yang Something' is showing at Cult Gallery, 10A, Jalan Persiaran Bukit Tunku, Kuala Lumpur until July 14. Tues to Sun, 11am to 5pm. By appointment only.
This article first appeared on June 16, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
