CNTRFLD. Looking at earlier works such as Is this a political statement? and Selamat Hari Sunday, how do you understand the relationship between those performance-based gestures and the more materially varied language of your current practice?
BP. Regardless of medium, there is always an undertone of performative-ness to my works which is a term I don’t deem derogatory. Ten years ago, I was painting myself blue or interviewing myself about anatomical autonomy and acting out subversively improvised or choreographed ideas in front of a camera with the only intended audience being the internet. At this point in time, I did not know the term ‘performance art’ or understand that this urge to express this way has its merit, history and acknowledgement through the proper channels. The only person I knew that was doing what I was doing was myself, so my pool of references was small, which is why the initial recorded performances were so simple, unpolished and special because I never learnt how to do it like anyone else.
I fell into art by chance from doing what I love. I started by performing as the person I wanted to be. Someone who is able to translate personal disorder into synergetic creativity. Who draws, writes poetry, makes films and takes photographs. It is both separate and sewn into the fabric of my being. It is this exact active awareness on the aspect of performance that becomes my way of being sincere. My own physicality is often at the forefront of the photography or drawing works on paper, my own stories and experiences in the poetry I write. All these representations accumulate to platform a presence above all else and a reclamation of my time, thinking, energy, space, autonomy. It is exercising full custody of these components in my life that I do not take for granted through expression that is up for interpretation but most importantly, knowing my values and principles of this expression when no one is clapping or looking.
CNTRFLD. Early presentation contexts such as The Backroom KL are often significant for emerging practices. What did working within those infrastructures enable in terms of audience formation and critical positioning?
BP. I worked with The Backroom KL through my friend and fellow artist, chitoo, who was producing this group exhibition called ‘Favouritism is my favourite-ism’ in 2023 where he explores the power dynamic of the art industry. He deliberately curated a line-up of only his favourite artists stating that this is the way art circulates and artists contextualised based on the opinion of a small group of people.
I’ve also worked with the critically acclaimed writer, Ellen Lee, who is also a part of The Backroom’s core team. She wrote the revered exhibition essay for my solo presentation in 2025. Liza Ho herself is a gallerist that I deeply admire and respect for her love of both the players and the game. I could reach out to her with wild ideas, and she would see the possibilities in bringing them to life.
What working within these infrastructures introduced me to is that there are villages of interesting individuals that are actively dedicated towards platforming and moving the needle in the context of Southeast Asian art towards a global scale and that it is far from lonely in this shared communal mission.
CNTRFLD. Your work has also been presented in the UK, including Adult Lovesong. How did encountering a different institutional and cultural reading context recalibrate, or confirm, your understanding of how the work circulates?
BP. Showing Adult Lovesong in the UK confirmed that human intimacy, loneliness and the desire for connection are entirely universal. When people walked up to that wall of anonymized faces and lipstick marks, it proved to me that the core of the work doesn't need a cultural translation to be felt. People still looked for themselves, their own personal histories and relationships in the patterns.
Though this was a work by a Southeast Asian artist shown in a Western space, I didn’t lean into my 'otherness' just because of where I come from. Instead of reading the work through a lens of geographic distance, the UK context forced a reading based on shared contemporary reality. We are all navigating the same messy, fragmented ways of loving each other today. The local particulars of my life don't alienate global audiences; they anchor the work in a powerfully vulnerable way that anyone can relate to.
CNTRFLD. Across artist-led spaces, independent practice, and advisory or collaborative roles, what kinds of infrastructures have sustained your practice? Where have you found critical support, and where has that been absent or self-constructed?
BP. The most sustainable infrastructure for my practice has been my peer network. While commercial galleries offer visibility and support to a certain extent, artist-led spaces and independent communities provide the long-term structural planning that keeps me informed and grounded. Real support comes from informal mentorships and resource sharing with other fellow artists which can look as simple as using the internet to chat about our projects, struggles and achievements or share exhibition, residency or grant submissions with each other.
I also work freelance as a writer and do odd jobs to gain perspectives and financial support that inform my studio practice. The main infrastructure that keeps me afloat remains my daily routine in the studio. I find critical support to be available when one has the work to show for it. Spending time in the studio creating is not in vain in the long run although the days are sometimes slow, the months pass by anyways and the years go by fast.
I seek camaraderie and step out of my own psychological limitations through the confidence of my own skills and self. I am a big believer and practitioner of straightforwardly creating your own opportunities. If I don’t ask, the answer will always be ‘No’ so if there is a curator, space, gallery or artist I want to work with, I research the ways that I can get in touch with them and just ask.
CNTRFLD. As your work circulates increasingly across regional and international contexts, how do you negotiate the expectations of visibility within institutional and gallery frameworks while maintaining autonomy over your practice?
BP. My process is necessarily intimate, and it remains the same regardless of the eyes that land on it. I welcome collaboration and international visibility to honour the work and message that I view as bigger than myself, but the core values, negotiations, compromise and conclusions of my practice happen alone in the studio. My focus is on the walls of my studio and the energy that is put into them when creating the works and not on the scale of galleries. The works must foremost remain authentic to me, and the visibility and opportunities unfold organically.
CNTRFLD. You are currently developing a new body of work for an upcoming solo exhibition, described as a culmination of technical experimentation. What is being tested or reconfigured in this new body of work, and how does it sit within the trajectory of your practice?
BP. My first solo exhibition platformed works of poetry, paintings, drawings and photography in multiple series that were exclusively on paper. I’ve always felt a connection to the medium but the decision to use it exclusively was subconscious. It was when the works were being hung that I realised I had made my entire show on paper! With this upcoming solo, it is an intentional exploration.
Choosing paper as the backdrop for its ephemeral nature, finding its connection as one of the most familiar textures to humankind referencing interactions with money, books, food packaging, receipts and everyday life. Paper is personal to me reminiscent of how it all started with arts and crafts as a child to the first sketchbook I ever had in 2019, when a mentor of mine told me to “Draw one thing in here every day”, to the early pictures I made in finding my strokes that later exhibited in the setting of a gallery as my debut in 2021.
This current experimentation is a marriage between former year naivety and medium maturity through methods I’m learning as I’m doing or ones, I learnt from art books and programs I watched on TV as a child. Paper remains a lifelong meditation in my practice.
CNTRFLD. This feels like a significant transitional moment in your practice—with upcoming exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur and at the Pattani Biennale, alongside your upcoming residency with Goethe-Institut and Basis e.V. in Frankfurt. With your second solo exhibition now moving to 2027, what feels most generative or urgent in your practice right now, and what are you hoping this period of movement and expansion will open?
BP. My work threads the fine line between the hyper-personal and the commonplace, even down to my moniker, Binti. I love navigating these kinds of layers in memory, lived experience and cultural nuance using our everyday bilingualism, like my debut show, 'Sesuatu yang Something' which translates to ‘Something that is something’.
Right now, what feels most urgent is preserving that everyday instinct to create, however it may look. The sketchbook thinking, the piling up of audio and visual cues, the physical media that trigger something in me. What I hope this upcoming international movement opens up is a test of translation for both myself and the audience. I’m curious to see what happens to the vernacular of my visual language when it’s stripped of its local context. What I’ll learn, how the humour lands, how the themes resonate and translate with a completely different audience.
I'm treating this period with an open mind as I absorb new environments, collaborate, and push my storytelling into places I can't quite predict yet. The works to follow will be a wider reflection of this ongoing quest.
CNTRFLD. Finally, in the context of increasingly precarious conditions for emerging artists, what forms of discipline or positioning have allowed you to maintain clarity in your practice over time?
BP. It is not a one size fits all journey, and it will look different for everybody. We’ll all get to where we are meant to be in our own time through our own circumstances which is something I have to remind myself to stay focused in this age of constant noise. Here, there is both support and opposition, there is conditional love and unconditional bias, there is the underlying tension and glossy medicine.
When I talk to artists from other parts of the world, I learn more or less the same troubles, demands and expectations just in different languages and intensities. In the end what matters as an artist is to keep the trust in my own personhood, journey, experiences and process close to me while I navigate these terrains and acknowledging that I am a part of nature, that I require periods of rehabilitation, recalibration, and leeway for life's unpredictability. I like remembering “Man plans, God laughs” because it reminds me that art is not everything, but everything is art.
