VIRTUAL TOUR – Minstrel Kuik: She who has no self
3.4.20
Minstrel Kuik: She who has no self opened on 15 February 2020 at the Horsham Regional Art Gallery. PHOTO 2020 is proud to share this virtual tour and installation shots of the exhibition captured before the Gallery was closed as a precaution for COVID-19.
Minstrel Kuik explores the truth of self amongst the complexities of modern life.
Manifesting as photography, photo books and installation, She who has no self questions the politics of place, familial and cultural identity, and how these intersect with lived experiences.
Born in Malaysia of Chinese ancestry, Kuik lives in Kajang – a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. Living the tensions between different ideologies and social bounds, Kuik finds herself and her art negotiating a place between political society and authoritarian forces.
From the lens of contemporary life, Minstrel Kuik’s art practice considers and questions the politics of place, family and cultural identity and how this intersects with personal experience.
Born in Malaysia of Chinese ancestry, she lives and works in a suburban neighbourhood on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur where negotiating the tensions of different ideologies and social bounds is an everyday occurrence. Interested in how the act of seeing is shaped by society, Kuik explores photography’s equivocal relationship to truth, to understand the self amongst the complexities of modern life in Malaysia.
With photography at the core of her multidisciplinary practice Kuik works across the disciplines of drawing, photo books, fabric assemblage and installation. Diary-like snapshots and carefully constructed digital images form a distinctive output from which Kuik works and reworks.
The universal themes of the self and belonging are explored through a new work that gives the exhibition its title and the series Mer.rly Mer.rly Mer.rly Mer.rly shown in its entirety for the first time in this exhibition.
Minstrel Kuik: She who has no self, curated by Alison Eggleton, is a Horsham Regional Art Gallery exhibition presented as part of PHOTO 2020 International Festival of Photography. Read an essay by Alison Eggleton about the exhibition here.