All the Lands Within the Seas
All the Lands Within the Seas, co-curated with Lim Sheau Yun, was exhibited at The Back Room in Kuala Lumpur from mid-October to mid-November 2021. Anchored by archival and historical cartographic materials from a private collection, the exhibition was interwoven with new works by Amanda Gayle and Sabahan artist Bam Hizal, whose woodcut prints and digital collages respond to Melaka’s maritime afterlives. Drawing from both colonial and vernacular histories, the project offered a "visual history of maritime Melaka" that interrogates how narratives—elaborated, withheld, or imagined—constitute our understanding of this port city’s significance.
Conceptually, the exhibition is rooted in an ethos of absence as method: the curatorial essay, invokes Henri Lefebvre to pose the central challenge—how do we navigate historical voids without collapsing into fantasy or erasure? Rejecting Melaka as an unquestioned center, the project situates it instead as a point of transit among broader flows of trade, migration, and encounter—encompassing geographies as varied as Deshima, Venice, Havana, and Masulipatnam, and communities including Orang Laut, Sama-Bajau, Luçones, and European colonists. This relational mapping, visual and conceptual, unsettles teleological narratives that have compulsively positioned Melaka as the founding myth of nationhood.
Through this framing, All the Lands Within the Seas gestures toward a methodology of imaginative excavation: piecing together fragmentary records, re-centring subjugated voices, and rendering Melaka less as origin and more as constellated site of historiographic pluralism.
Exhibition Brochure:
https://files.cargocollective.com/c1092978/Brochure.pdf
