Per°Form CoThink Lab Digital Lecture — Image, Data, Actor: Unpacking Images of Muslim Women by Nurul Huda Rashid

Moderated by Dr. Ong Keng Sen

Synopsis

The Muslim woman has been a consistent subject of representation across regimes of historical colonialism and Orientalism, in events such as the Arab Spring and post-9/11, and mediated widely via news and social media. These have included variegated representations from the odalisque to the ‘oppressed’ which have converged the identity of the Muslim woman to the single image and symbol of the hijab (veil). Spanning across different bodies of work, this lecture will introduce and plot Nurul’s photographic, annotative, and participatory research that have engaged with representations of Muslim women from the daguerreotype to data. These projects will be discussed alongside the medium of photography and the data shift, which transforms the self into data, rendering those in the margins as ‘absent data’. Through self-reflexive means and methods, the context of ‘absent data’ will become site for artistic explorations and aspire towards a recalibration of Muslim women identified via the role of the Muslim woman as ‘actor’ in rethinking processes of image-making.

About Nurul Huda Rashid

Nurul Huda Rashid is a researcher-writer currently pursuing her PhD in Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on images and narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them. These have been articulated through projects such as Women in War (2016-ongoing), unknown woman/wanita kami (2021), Hijab/Her (2012-2014), and through collaborations such as Pulau Something (2021) and New Curriculum for Old Questions (2019). Nurul loves smelling old books, looking after plant babies, and hopes to adopt a cat someday.