![]() Growing up, I always heard : ‘ Kan menyusahkan’, ‘ Kasihan dia’, ‘ Sudah lah, nanti siapa nak kahwin dengan dia?’. The healers she encountered as a child suggested various ‘cures’ for her disability: changing her name to a more an auspicious one, drinking water with jampi and even use a ruler and cardboard to ‘straighten’ her legs.īorn with osteogenesis imperfecta (also known as OI or brittle bone syndrome), Fariza spends much time in hospitals: either recovering from broken bones or going for intravenous treatments of pamidronate, aimed to strengthen her bones. When scientific explanations for conditions are insufficient, some people choose to engage traditional or religious healers known as bomoh. Part of her interest in mythology is due to the salience of traditional healing in Malay culture, especially in the realm of physical and mental disabilities. “Would you ask someone else if they were able to get married and if they were allowed to? So, why is it applicable to me?” Then he asked, ‘Are you allowed to?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Are you able to get married?’ I was like, ‘Sorry? How is this relevant to the job that I applied for?’” When she asked him why he was interrogating her, he said that he did not know how to speak to a person with a disability. Plaintively, she recalls an interview at the current workplace, when the first thing the human resource staff asked her was if she was married. “I said, ‘No, I’m not’. People question me, are you able to reproduce, have babies? Are you able to have a boyfriend?” If a woman is not beautiful she will not be desired. “These kinds of stories motivate me to know more about why women are subjected to such perceptions, regardless of culture. The Malaysian film Sanggul Beracun (2011) directed by Sabri Yunus, was based on this story. In order to maintain this beauty, she then marries and kills 99 men. One of her pieces, Che Siti 99, refers to the legend of an ugly, hunchbacked Malay woman who became beautiful after making an unholy pact with a penunggu, a magical creature in Malay folklore. As research on this is abundant in the contexts of Europe and North America, Fariza focuses on stories of women with ‘burdened bodies’ in Southeast Asian mythology. Most of my research is about archaic laws: what it does to a person with disability, the kinds of treatments they got, and how barbaric it often was,” she says. “Most of my art pieces are about the burdened body. By night, the 30-year-old relates her personal research on mythological women to her life and expresses it in her evocative performative pieces. By day, she works in a hotel as a communications and reservations agent. As an artist, Nur Fariza observes, in great depth, that art imitates life. ![]()
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