Artists-in-Residence: Grace Baey and Nurul Huda Rashid
GRACE BAEY
Grace Baey is a Singapore-based photographer with an interest in social issues. A human geographer by training, she is especially interested in questions of place, identity and belonging. Her current work deals with issues of social marginalisation, with focus on the transgender community in Southeast Asia and Singapore. Grace made the shift from academic research to photography around 2015.
Grace participated in the Objectifs Reciprocal Residency with our International Partner, Myanmar Deitta, spending February 2018 in Yangon, Myanmar and documenting the transgender community in Myanmar. Click here to read more about her experience, the relationships she forged during her residency, and how this series fits into her long-term project about the transgender community in Singapore.
Ow Wei, 21, is the youngest member of a transgender dance group called Moe Goe Nyan Gyer, which means “Thunder Little Birds”. She joined when she was 11 years old, after being estranged from her family. She doesn’t know what the future holds for her, but hopes that she can find employment as a make-up artist Ⓒ Grace Baey
Chris has an uneasy relationship with her grandfather who dotes on her, and doesn’t mind her putting on make-up at home. He is particularly concerned about her future, and struggles to fully understand why she would want to transition to be a woman. Ⓒ Grace Baey
Grace sharing her work at Myanmar Deitta. Image credit: Sai Htin Linn Htet
NURUL HUDA RASHID
Nurul Huda Rashid is an educator, writer and image-maker and was the Oct-Nov 2018 resident in our Objectifs Artist Studio residency programme. Lecturing in different subjects across Anthropology, Liberal and Visual Arts, she commutes across different classrooms with a love for facilitation and performance. She is also a researcher whose interests focus on issues concerning the visual and sentient body, visual imagery and methodologies, narratives (text and the telling), and feminism. This often ties up with notions of identity, both as expressed through Self and Other. Her research interests are manifested through different mediums, in both text and the visual. (http://nurulh.weebly.com).
During her studio residency at Objectifs, Nurul worked on Women in War, an ongoing four-phase project that looks at women as the subject of focus in war and conflict photography, exploring images of women in war and how they reflect the ways in which women’s bodies are photographed and represented; and in thinking about how women respond to acts and sites of violence.
