Image courtesy of Wardah Mohamad
Fyerool Darma's object and material experimentations are based on an extensive visual vocabulary drawn from popular culture, literature, the archives, the Internet and the artist's own life.
A painter by training, Fyerool Darma (b. 1987, Singapore) is an artist who integrates sound, video, new media, sculpture, texts and craft practices into his recent installations, which juxtapose the aesthetics and ideology of modernism alongside south east asian cultures, histories, aesthetics, and politics. He has gradually developed a complex visual vocabulary that draws from sources including tangible and intangible malay heritage, archives, the Internet, literature, popular culture, the history of craft, visual arts, manufacturing, and manual labor.
He repurposes salvaged textiles, e-waste, found images, paintings, and other materials as a collaborative process with other artists and producers to blur the boundaries of authorship in his works.
Fyerool’s ongoing research into modernist forms and Southeast Asian vocabularies is encapsulated in an ongoing project - lå…¥ndsc_p€$ (2019-ongoing), that synthesises with an earlier project After Ballads (2017-2018). fyær d’s works collectively evoke the complex history and reverbs of colonialism, postwar techno-military-industrialisation, and contemporary climate crisis, situated amid a tropical post-apocalyptic and post-Internet landscape.
He continues to live and work in Singapore, where he divides his time teaching art to youths at a non-profit organisation situated in Jurong, and attending to his family and caring for Pipi, their reptilian housemate. His recent presentations include, SAM Contemporaries: Residues and Remixes, Singapore Art Museum (2023); Archipelagic Futurism: an land erode into..., Calle Wright, Manila (2023); Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations About Art, National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum (2022 - 2023); and Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, National Gallery Singapore (2022-2023).
He formulated the project After Ballads, between 2017 to 2018 as part of the NUS Museum’s prep-room. Later between October 2019 to April 2020, fyerool was an Artist-in-Residence at NTU - Centre of Contemporary Art Singapore where he and his interlocutors laboured in the production and materialising of speculative materials through Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø forms, ♥) at the Centre’s Vitrine. He was an applicant for the National Library Creative Residency in 2022 - where he examined the textile mills in 1950s to 1960s in Singapore amidst the industrialization of Malaya.