On the artist’s otherworldly responses to the crises of our time

Over the past 150 years or so, St John’s Island, south of Singapore, has served as an offshore processing centre for undesirables from the mainland. St John’s, or Sakijang Bendera (the Malay name, which has multiple origin stories, literally means ‘deer flag’), has functioned variously as a quarantine station for victims of cholera and leprosy, a detention centre for political prisoners, an opium-addict rehab facility and a refugee shelter.

During the 1970s, however, efforts were made to rehabilitate the island’s image. The land was developed for recreational use and featured holiday camps and chalets. Nature lovers now visit to witness the vibrant wildlife, which includes coastal forests and coral reefs, as well as native birds and marine animals. Today, the island is also home to a multilayered installation by Zarina Muhammad that embraces its history and celebrates its past and present inhabitants – human and nonhuman, immaterial or material. It’s titled Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Eating Soil (2022) and is a part of this year’s Singapore Biennale. And that event as a whole – which occurs at various venues across the country – lurks somewhere between the human and nonhuman, and is named, as you might a child, island or hurricane, Natasha.

In St John’s main administrative building, Zarina has set up a four-pillared structure inspired by saka guru, the central foundation that holds up a building or a roof in traditional Javanese architecture. The area below the saka guru is believed to be sacred and usually treated with certain rituals. Here Zarina has placed a shrine-like arrangement of mystical paraphernalia and symbolic artefacts, which she describes via email as a “a cosmographic map-diorama composed of various material and visual elements that are connected to historical, mythic, speculative and architectural markers on the island and the waters/landmarks beyond her shores”. These elements include a round mirror, referencing a still-standing ‘moon gate’, a Chinese-style circular opening to gardens, erected by German civilians housed there by the British government during the Second World War; an antique tobacco-cutter alludes to the opium smokers; and a gentorag (a brass bell-rattle used in Indonesian music) gestures towards a bell tower previously located at a sentry post on the island’s jetty.

Painted cutouts of eight animals – cat, tiger, dog, bird, mouse, deer, crocodile, fish – are stuck on the pillars of the central installation. These creatures correspond to the eight animals arranged around the cardinal points of a compass found in old Bugis (one of the ethnic groups of South Sulawesi) divination diagrams. These magic charts, on which days of the year could be plotted, provide advice on practical matters; a tiger day is good for marrying or for planting rice, for instance. Besides connecting Zarina’s work to esoteric traditions, these animals invoke a history in which nonhuman archetypes act as a guide for human action.

Moving Earth… contains two key corollaries in Zarina’s works. The first is Southeast Asian mythologies and magic; the second an ecofeminist, Chtulucenic attunement to the entanglements and affinities we have with the nonhuman. What both strands of thought have in common is their decentralisation of the human, especially the human as imagined in the Eurocentric, Enlightenment paradigm of the rational, secular and unitary subject. They each propose radically different modes of nonrational knowledge and of coexistence with all manner of seen and unseen beings.

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