Zulkhairi Zulkiflee

Kicking off the first episode of our third season, we hand the microphone over to acclaimed playwright, writer, and poet Alfian Sa’at for a conversation with our Artist-in-Residence Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. In this insightful exchange dotted with amusing observations on Singaporean Malay slang, the two trace Zulkhairi’s artistic trajectory—from his educational background to his ongoing inquiry into Malay social ontology and into the politics of representation. Throughout the conversation, they discuss the trope of the “Malay boy” that features prominently across Zulkhairi’s body of work, addressing questions of agency, empowerment, and the subject-object dichotomy in art. Zulkhairi also opens up about his current research on the Malay slang word “world” which he frames as a concept and a creative proposition to find new ways of looking at historical representations of minorities.

With a body of work spanning across film, installation, and photography, the artistic practice of Zulkhairi Zulkiflee is committed to exploring Malay identity and its social ontology. His lens-based artworks investigate themes of Malayness in relation to local and global contexts, social agency, knowledge production, and notions of taste. Zulkhairi is also an educator, independent curator, and founder of Sikap, a project group that engages with the creative value of ‘let do’ in the form of organizational experiments.

Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of the theatre company Wild Rice. His published works include collections of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and plays. In 2001, Alfian won the Golden Point Award for Poetry as well as the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature. In past years, Alfian has received the Best Original Script at the Life! Theatre Awards four times and was nominated for the Singapore Literature Price three times.