After Ballads is a prep-room project by artist Fyerool Darma that locates literary foundations to historic figures such as Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, and objects from the museum collection. This series of presentations are exercises on the epistemology of texts, artefacts, and systems of language that proceeds to trace how it is shaping contemporary society.

The current phase of this project inquires on the scribe Munshi Abdullah and the recurring impression that his work was to embody values of the colonial British. Darma speculates on this individual’s agenda in the milieu where fiction and non-fiction were not literary conventions.

Fieldnotes 05102017, Fyerool Darma, 2017. Image courtesy of NUS Musem