Zarina Muhammad
Breathing in Unbreathable Circumstances
The installation Breathing in Unbreathable Circumstances (2022) intricately weaves together video, photography, and sculptural objects to explore connections between the human and non-human world. Central to the work is a 10-minute video essay that likens water bodies to beating hearts, underscoring the intimate relationship between circulatory and respiratory systems. The accompanying photographs, taken during pre-dawn intertidal walks and kayaking along shorelines, highlight the acorn worm—a detritus-feeding marine creature abundant on Cyrene Reef. Muhammad frames these worms, sharing 70% of the human genome, as wise, queer kin that prompt us to rethink our place in the natural world.
The object installation, including salt-clay-incense effigies housed in a glass miniature shrine, offers a contemplative space tied to ritual and spirituality. Through interwoven narratives of flora, micro-fauna, and marine life, the work delves into environmental and eco-cultural histories. Muhammad emphasizes the layered connections between land, water, and all living entities, urging viewers to see them as animated, breathing, and historically rich. By fostering a sense of interconnectivity, the piece invites reflection on humanity’s relationship with non-human beings and the environment, challenging us to listen to the wisdom embedded in the landscapes and creatures that surround us.
Zarina Muhammad's long-term interdisciplinary project involves critically re-examining oral histories, ethnographic literature, and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia, demonstrating her artistic achievement and potential. Her works explore and encompass the polyphonic and poly sensorial state between nature, the environment, rituals, and spirituality, revealing her deeply grounded commitment to eco-feminism. Zarina's locally accumulated knowledge and engagement against the canonization and rationalization of Western modernity is evident in her works. Over the past few years, she has collaborated or worked independently on several installations, workshops, and lecture-performances, imbued with her understanding of the lived experience and belief system rooted in the region, including land, waterways, water bodies, and islands. She presents the mode of communal gathering and sharing, mythology, and spirituality embedded in Singapore and Malaysia's cultural landscape and tradition. Whilst the artist also reflects on how the urban space and its governing state has been dominantly ruling a way of seeing and addressing our environment, her embracing dialogs closely navigating sustainability in Southeast Asia and beyond constantly addresses necessary critical awareness of the overlaying numerous excluded voices of non-human beings and their lives threatened by the impact of ongoing human expansion.