Inventory of Intimacies: A group exhibition by Ang Xia Yi, Cheong See Min, and Nia Khalisa

The Back Room is pleased to announce our latest show, Inventory of Intimacies, a group exhibition featuring three emerging Malaysian artists working with textiles: Ang Xia Yi, Cheong See Min, and Nia Khalisa. Within their practices, textiles, found fabrics, and fibres are used as means for recording time and history on a more intimate scale, against the backdrop of grander societal narratives. Represented in the show are a range of textile and fibre mediums, including pictorial patchwork quilting, weaving, and batik drawings.

Inventory of Intimacies looks at three practices that harness textile’s ability across its diverse sub-practices to capture the fluid and indistinct quality of memory. Less faithful than photography or statistics, less crystallising than language, all of which fix memory in too precise a representation, textiles, by their very nature, convey impressions that appeal to the sensual side of human nature and the soft comfort of nostalgia.