2020 VIDEO COMMISSION

In collaboration with Lee Ren Xin…an interview on the work can be found here. From Asia New Zealand Foundation:

Artists Lee Ren Xin and Paul Timings met while Paul was on a Foundation residency in Malaysia in 2015 and have kept in touch ever since, sharing ideas about art, society and politics. For the IN TOUCH arts commissions, Paul has rendered a series of Ren Xin’s photographs taken in and around her neighbourhood in Petaling Jaya. The project is driven by Ren Xin’s long-term project in her neighbourhood, using dance and the body’s presence in and through common spaces as a way to make sense of social roles and relations in her community.

Can you describe the work?

PT: Ren Xin has been working on this long-term project in her neighbourhood in Petaling Jaya. She documents the project, in part, through photographing transient/liminal spaces in her neighbourhood, Petaling Jaya. Spaces intended for housing, spaces intended for commerce, how those intended spaces are represented, and how those intended spaces are utilised. The images that we produced are something of a sprout that fell from one of the many branches Ren Xin is cultivating for this long-term project.

RX: The photos are a documentation effort parallel to my long-term work in a residential compound in vicinity of where I live. Questions around non-existent relationship to land (due to commercial development and property ownership), how spaces are constantly constructed for the marketplace, rather than for living and coexisting. The lack of space for pedestrian and social interaction and design that is solely for enclosed spaces and for vehicles, seem to bring with it a sense of alienation and isolation amongst folks who live in this city. This alienation and isolation can also be disempowering when it comes to agency and participation in what is going on on this land that we live in. It is almost as if the urban design (or the lack of) is diminishing the body. And as the body disappears in this urbanscape, so do the humane and living well together.

…for further details on the work, please continue reading the interview at Asia New Zealand Foundation.