Recollections of Long Lost Memories
2007 - Installation (Installation)
Installation dimensions variable: 2.54 cm
Ahmad Fuad Osman
Recollections of Long Lost Memories by Ahmad Fuad Osman is a series of 71 black and white sepia-toned archival photographs that chart, with nostalgia, the social encounters between hierarchies of life in the Malay world. It begins with British colonial rule in the mid 1800s, followed by its occupation by Japanese forces in the 1940s, the rise of Communism in the 1950s, and then the racial issues between Islamic, Chinese, and Indonesian populations in a multicultural country desiring political independence in the 1960 and 70s. The archival photographs in this series were gleaned from national archives, museums, libraries, and old books across Malaysia. Comically embedded within each of these rare archival photographs is a figure in technicolor, heavily bearded, sunglass clad in a T-shirt and jeans; this intruder’s attire is at great odds with the highly uniform dress of his culture’s past. This bohemian figure is cleverly inserted, as if in conversation with his ‘hosts’, as if his difference (his dress obviously from another era) is of no concern. Whether talking with a group of local women each holding a traditional umbrella, a public ceremony with officials sitting on raised dias, protests against political legitimacy, or seemingly leisurely bike rides through an antiquated downtown Kuala Lumpur, this intruder mimics pose and object with a subcultural flair and casual Western attitude. Where there is a weapon, he carries a guitar; his red and white plastic mass-produced umbrella attempting to dialog with its past. Recollections of Long Lost Memories was produced the year Malaysia celebrated fifty years of independence—a celebration (and tolerance) of its cultural complexity. It is a work that speaks to Fuad’s continual reappraisal of his culture’s past, begging a re-remembering of its values, acknowledging that the people who come and go can often be overlooked in the modern world’s reliance on images.
Ahmad Fuad Osman is of a generation that came of age in a Malay world whose artists were eager to speak about socio-political issues on terms that broadened questions of nationhood, ethnicity, faith, and historical fact, doubtful of the grand narrative that had been propounded since the race riots of the late 1960s. Such qualities provide the grounding framework for the establishment of acclaimed artist collective Matahati (1991-2011), of which Fuad was a co-founder, believing such issues were valid on a universal platform. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Fuad’s practice embraces multiple forms of media; he is drawn to the impact of political narratives, their materiality, their psychological imprint, their social repercussions, and their symbols. Fuad’s work calls attention to the dubious fragility between fact and fiction, and how memory and its values can be easily monopolized. His practice speaks to the immense distrust of the ‘official’ record that is currently present in much art across Southeast Asia, in addition to the rising investigation of the arrival of the Islamic world in this region and its legacies.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Voluspa Jarpa
2012To make Minimal Secret (2012), Jarpa created sculptures based on pages of declassified CIA information about the United States’ involvement in Chile...
© » NYTIMES LENS
At 90, Photographer Fred Baldwin Still Has ‘So Much Work Left to Do’ - The New York Times Lens | At 90, Photographer Fred Baldwin Still Has ‘So Much Work Left to Do’ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/lens/fred-baldwin-photography.html Give this article Share Advertisement Continue reading the main story Fred Baldwin reckons he could have become a writer — if the manual Olivetti typewriter he used while studying at Columbia in 1955 had spell-check...
© » ASX
Maude Arsenault – Resurfacing – AMERICAN SUBURB X Skip to content Her work invests the themes of female representation, private space, domesticity and intimacy within the framework of a photographic and material approach which oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes and images documentaries...
![Kenya breakdancing picking up but no federation to support it](https://s.france24.com/media/display/08aaa004-7976-11ee-bf9b-005056a90284/w:1280/p:16x9/m:{"brand":"FRANCE24","lang":"EN","program":"","cartouche":"KENYA","hash":"0564cbc2c1d03197d2b96f7db79de046bcab5271291652b6e77d4731fdca93a7","title":"Breakdancing%20%250Apicking%20up","id":"5535ce5c-cd7e-11ed-854c-005056bf30b7"}/EN_20231101_215400_215533_CS.jpg)
© » FRANCE24
Kenya breakdancing picking up but no federation to support it - France 24 Skip to main content Kenya breakdancing picking up but no federation to support it Issued on: 02/11/2023 - 12:50 Modified: 02/11/2023 - 12:53 01:33 While breakdancing will feature in the Paris 2024 Olympics, many enthusiasts in Kenya are attracting younger generations to this urban dance popular in the 1980s...
© » KADIST
Phan Quang
2013Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam...
© » KADIST
Martin Kippenberger
19897″ Single ‘Pop In’ by Martin Kippenbergher consisting of a vinyl record and a unique artwork drawn by the artist on the record’s sleeve...
© » KADIST
An ever-growing collection of scripts, ideas and works by: Julieta Aranda, Olivier Babin, Francisco Camacho, Derick Carner, Asli Cavusoglu, Etienne Chambaud, Audrey Cottin, Torreya Cummings, Gintaras Didziapetris, Cerith Wyn Evans, Michael Fliri, Mark Geffriaud, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Loris Gréaud, Graham Gussin, Will Holder, Pierre Huyghe, Joachim Koester, Gabriel Lester, Jennifer Di Marco, Patrizio Di Massimo, Nicholas Matranga & Francesca Bennet, Piero Passacantando, Cesare Pietroiusti, Matthew Shannon, Snowden Snowden, Gareth Spor, Maryelizabeth Yarbrough, Carey Young...
© » KADIST
Luisa Lambri
2002Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
© » KADIST
Ahmet Ögüt
2022Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers...
© » KADIST
Sung Hwan Kim
2010This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010...
© » KADIST
Roman Ondak
2003As the caption purposely admits, these drawings were made by friends of Ondák’s at home in Slovakia asked to interpret places he has journeyed to...
