8 August 2025, 11:25am - 11:40am
Starting from the notion that the creative process demands the artist to become a medium, a channeller, and a healer, the recent pandemic turned my research inwards. Where one might usually take a mode of transport to journey outward, I instead embarked on an internal journey—one that is costless yet, for me, the most daunting. This journey explored the possibility of human DNA—specifically, the artist's body—becoming a receptacle for information or a form of data storage, whether from a temporal (ancient) past, or from mystical, metaphysical, or supranatural (distinct from supernatural) dimensions.
Over time, it became clearer that human DNA and genetics may function as an omnipresent yet invisible library, accessible to everyone beneath the Akashic heavens. My research drew on various sources of knowledge from within the Malay Archipelago (Nusantara), as well as lived experiences from my own extended family, which traces its roots to the Baba Nyonya heritage—a cultural rather than genetic lineage. This heritage exists within a taxonomy of cultural hybridities, assimilation, and shapeshifting that responds fluidly to terrains and the demands of shifting milieus.
Through engagement with figures such as shamans, Tok Batin, tukang ubat, pawang kampung, and dukun—each fulfilling roles as mediums, channellers, and healers within indigenous systems of knowledge—I began to appreciate that our region’s ancestral knowledge has always resided within us. With the right training, conditions, and psychological openness, the human body can serve as a conduit for skills, memory, histories, intangible heritage, and knowledge from a transcendent reality.
This talk will include excerpts from some of my artworks, including Dara, Bini, Mati Laki (Maiden, Wife, Widow), 14 mins, 2020, and Tak Tau Chai Si, 2020, as illustrations for this presentation.
Sherman is a filmmaker, photographer and visual artist. His practice has always centred on the human condition and our relationships with others within the larger milieu.
Winner of the Prudential Eye Awards 2015 for Photography and the ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu Photography Award 2010, Sherman has premiered works in Art Biennales, major Film Festivals and Museums around the world, including the Venice, Singapore, Yin Chuan, Jakarta Biennales, Fukuoka and Asia Pacific Triennale, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, The Tate Modern, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Musee du Quai Branly Paris, Centre Pompidou Paris, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, VideoBrasil Contemporary Art Festival, Singapore Art Museum, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Queensland Art Gallery, South Australia Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre, Lithuania and MART Museum of Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy.
He is a founding member of 13 Little Pictures, a film collective based in Singapore. He also serves on the committee of the Singapore International Photography Festival, as an educator at schools and universities, and was an Associate Artist of the Substation.
He was invited to participate in the Singapore Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (2009) which garnered a Special Mention. He is nominated for the APB-Singapore Art Museum Signature Art Prize 2011 and was one of the Top 30 Finalists of the Sovereign Asian Art Award 2016. He collaborated on the Little Sun project headed by Olafur Eliasson which premiered at the Tate Modern London in 2012. His works are in the collections of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum and the Seoul Art Centre Korea.
In the summer of 2017, he exhibited in SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia (1980s to Now) co-organsied by the National Art Center, Tokyo, the Mori Art Museum, and the Japan Foundation Asia Center in Tokyo, Japan.