Yeo Workshop is pleased to present a series of new works by Singaporean artist Fyerool Darma for the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul (2-5 September 2022). The artist mediates Southeast Asian rural and urban culture with our new-age cosmopolitanism, developing object and material experimentations based on an extensive visual vocabulary drawn from popular culture, literature, the archives, the Internet, and his own life.
Building on his ongoing Screenshot series,Fyerool proposes an environment for exploring a type of supra-locality – the cultural currency of textiles from the pre-modern to hyper-real. Drawing equally upon illusion and allusion, he interlaces and embroiders found images and texts from digital and other archival sources into a series of objects that oscillate between the realms of the digitally foraged and manually produced. These framed weavings contain dyes transferred by heat onto polymer threads and remnants of textiles, amalgamated with labour and knowledge. They are configured with stock images of songket* and video game backgrounds on the wall in a way that is neither naturally picturesque nor logically constrained by the coding guidelines of warp and weft.
The presentation is an exercise in composing oneself and decomposing images to recompose a visual pantun or culturally-modular quatrain in a context of hypervisuality and climate change. Developed in experimental antilinear conversation with art historian and curator Karin Oen, it continues the artist’s exploration of imagery, technologies and temporal hiccups. Its first iteration was presented at the gallery earlier in January, followed by a second iteration in London at Tabula Rasa gallery. Frieze Seoul marks the third iteration and development of Darma’s research around forgotten and obscured Malay history, particularly the Nusantaran culture.
Fyerool Darma has been exhibited internationally at ASEAN Culture House, Busan (2022); Tabula Rasa Gallery, London (2022); Yeo Workshop, Singapore (2022, 2019); National University Singapore Museum, Singapore (2017-19); Vargas Museum, Philippines (2022); Nanyang Technological University – Art, Design and Media Gallery, Singapore (2021);ISCP, New York (2019); World Trade Centre, New York (2019); Kaliurang-Jogjakarta, (2019); Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Singapore (2019); Objectifs Centre of Photography, Singapore (2017). He participated in the Singapore Biennial 2016 and will be included in a forthcoming survey at National Gallery Singapore in November 2022-2023.
*Songket is a Tenun fabric that belongs to the brocade family of textiles of the Malay world. It is hand-woven in silk or cotton, and intricately patterned with gold or silver threads. The metallic threads stand out against the background cloth to create a shimmering effect.