Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan, Singapore
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau focuses on the southern shore of Singapore, stretching from the port at Keppel to the former site of Batu Berlayar, a large geological formation that was known to old-world navigators and that was subsequently destroyed by the British.
This is a historical site of colonial intervention in the environment, which continues today in the form of massive infrastructural development and land reclamation by the modern Singapore state. This site is a fascinating way to track the ecological, social, and spiritual reverberations of centuries of human intervention on Singapore island.
The work unfolds as a series of vessels, each one part diorama, part instrument, part shrine, part spirit house, bearing traces of our research and emotional responses to the social, spiritual, and cultural histories of the southern coast and related areas. These vessels give access to pathways, knowledges, histories, and spirits that have been buried and violently displaced by modern infrastructural interventions in the surrounding area.
These “dioramas” exist along an emotional trajectory that starts from a place of trauma and blockage—in works that critically examine colonial and present-day infrastructural, progress-driven development, as well as biographical reflections on religious trauma. It then moves towards narratives of bodily and cathartic release through shrines, spell-casting objects, and video essays that meditate on rituals of blessing, cleansing, as well as queer re-appropriations of hegemonic storytelling.
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau is a prayer, spell, archive and space-making intervention by Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan. It is part of an ongoing work that traces the restless topographies of lands scarred by imperial projects, past and present. The work seeks to practice a way of knowing beneath the ordinary and apparent: we seek out flows, whispers, communities, and intelligences that have been ignored, erased and left behind in the wake of violent infrastructures.
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
From the Makara wall:
This Southern tip of the mainland, which together with the Northwestern tip of Sentosa, a point called Tanjong Rimau, forms the entrance of the Old Straits of Singapore.
This was a maritime gateway that was known to sea travellers as early as the 1600s, probably long before. It was one of the major sea-routes if you wanted to travel from the West to China by sea, and vice versa. It’s an ancient watery gateway, and Batu Berlayar, Dragon Tooth’s Gate, presided over it as a marker. On very old maps, sometimes the only things you see of this island are the Old Straits, Batu Berlayar, and an old hill or two.
Here we think of the spiritual reverberation of all gateways, of channels of water, or of rocks overlooking the sea. What would it have meant for anyone at sea, along an otherwise featureless coast, to see a landmark as definite as Batu Berlayar sticking out from a cliff? What kinds of hope and joy and relief are pinned to such a rock? What kind of love is it imbued with? What kind of love attends to a place where people from different cultures meet?
In the 17th century, European sailors had to cross the Straits at night. The Orang Laut, who they hired as pilots, would float coconut husks filled with Benzoin resin and set them on fire to mark where the hazards were. Benzoin resin is an aromatic resin that’s used to make incense. Think on this magical image of the Straits alight with shells of burning incense—saying, variously, please leave, but also, don’t die, and also here lies danger, and also, go in peace; the elemental interplay of light and dark, life and death, love and transaction.
The British blew up Batu Berlayar in 1848 to make room; in a violent project of colonial terraforming that began in 1820, with the levelling of a hill in today’s Raffles Place. The sand that it released was used to fill up the marshy river around today’s Boat Quay. Many rivers were filled up or re-directed, mangroves paved over, waterways clogged and dammed, huge swathes of forest cleared to build plantations. Now we know the hunger for land stretches even beyond our borders, to neighbouring river-systems.
What gods guard this old gateway now? Is it gods of incense, tiger gods, sea gods, gods of rock and tree? A temple to industry lies there now.
Keppel Port, with its massive totems and pillars, receiving tribute coming in from faraway places. Though in due time, when the port is moved to Tuas, this temple will also become derelict, left to a process of digestion that will break it all down into some new reality.
In these places, all we hear is blockage. Blockage is the music of a violent reality that insists on itself. The feeling it leaves is something a bit like the grinding of teeth, or the scraping of finger on bone, or the dull thud of extractive fingers in sand.
We pray for healing on the water. A movement from blockage and congestion, towards release, we make utterances of desire for restoration and repair. To move from concrete to wind. Taking hard things and turning them into water, gas, and shit.
Because if we don’t pray, who will? Who will tend to the hidden, mind the shrine, clear the dead flowers, offer new ones, sing devotions, pray for our survival?
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau
© Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan
Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound, moving image and participatory practice, she is interested in the broader contexts of ecocultural and ecological histories, mythmaking, haunted historiographies, water cosmologies and chthonic realms.
Zachary Chan is a graphic designer, composer, sound designer and gamelan musician. His musical roots are based in central Javanese gamelan music and he has written music and designed sound for experimental films, plays, video games, storytelling and art installations. He is the co-founder of Studio Crop, a graphic design studio.
His work can be viewed on crop.sg
Joel Tan is a Singaporean writer, performer, and playwright based between London and Singapore. His work straddles theatre, film, and audio, and examines the ways in which politics distort the personal and spiritual, exploring subjects ranging from colonial history, nature, queer experience, and contemporary Singapore life. Joel also works interdisciplinarily, and has collaborated with visual artists, poets, musicians and dancers as a writer, director and dramaturg.
