Spotlight with Hamlatul Arsy Bolkiah
Hamlatul Arsy Bolkiah, Independent Curator / Southeast Asian Researcher / Artist, Brunei
Could you tell us a little more about your background and how you got into curating?
The root of all this goes back to being a curious five-year-old in my first art classes. It was that same curiosity that led me to train as a classical animator and visual development artist. Having worked in animation for more than fifteen years, at some point I felt I had reached a ceiling in the craft itself, not because there was nothing left to learn, but because, to tell better stories, I had to extend beyond the work into the thinking and structures around it.
It was during the Covid period that I began actively exhibiting my own work, and that was when something shifted. I became interested not only in making the work, but also in the experience around it.
In 2024, almost by chance, I had the opportunity to co-curate a Southeast Asian exhibition in Brunei with James Nguyen, an independent curator from Vietnam. That was the beginning, but my work has since moved beyond curating into the curatorial: from making exhibitions to a wider mode of inquiry, a way of asking questions about culture and letting the answers find their form over time. Deepening that interest is what led to the growth of my cultural laboratory, The Curious Playgrounds, and allowed long-form projects such as The Living Literature, Thundery Showers, and Daily Structures to take shape.
Who/what has influenced your curatorial practice?
People are sometimes surprised that I came to the curatorial from classical animation, but the two are closer than they look. Glen Keane, one of the animators who inspired me, describes animation as something that was never a single craft and even considers it the ultimate art form: it draws on acting, drawing, filmmaking, design, music and dance, all held together at once. An art form, he says, in which you never quite feel you have arrived.
To animate well, you're already thinking across disciplines, holding them in the same frame, and the curatorial asks for the same thing. Classical animation is the art of controlling how something unfolds in time; an exhibition is that problem moved into space. It also trains you to live in the small gestures, the half-second of anticipation that follows through to communicate an emotion. It teaches you to value the ordinary, the overlooked moments that hold more than they appear to. That is the attention I bring to my research: the everyday object, the ritual, the detail a wider lens would miss. The curatorial, for me, is that same attention, moved out of the frame and into the world.
The role of the curator is continuously changing. Could you describe what it means to be a curator today?
I think the role is moving away from the curator as a selector, the person who picks works and arranges them in a room. For me, being a curator today is less about exhibitions and more about the curatorial: building the structures that let an inquiry live. That means holding research, place and narrative in the same space, and creating the conditions a story needs to be understood, whatever form it eventually takes.
I've come to believe that cultural work cannot survive as isolated projects; it needs continuity. So I see the curator's role now as closer to custodianship than authorship: someone who builds the soft infrastructure our communities need, who tends to the work and lets it find its form, rather than deciding from above what matters.
Tell us about the latest exhibition / project that you curated.
The Living Literature is my ongoing research and curatorial practice through The Curious Playgrounds. It is a transdisciplinary and artistic framework that examines how stories, memory and cultural knowledge operate beyond the written page and within lived, embodied experience. Rooted in Southeast Asia (SEA), The Living Literature is a cyclical, participatory and material-led framework in which its cultural projects attend to the specificities of SEA and take the unspectacular as material worth staging.
It treats Southeast Asian (SEA) heritage not as archival material to be preserved, but as living knowledge systems to be reactivated. The work is structured in cycles, each anchored around a single element: the jasmine flower, the chicken, Peribahasa (Malay proverbs), and objects of the Malay built environment, to name a few.
Each cycle moves through three phases: Investigation, Translation and Activation, so that heritage moves from something analysed to something lived. The cycles don't stand alone; they reinterpret each other retroactively, so the project is less a series of finished studies than a slowly accumulating assemblage.
Most recently, I presented a workshop at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference (RPIC) in Singapore, drawn from the Peribahasa cycle and using an approach to learning Peribahasa through the sensorial rather than the textual, in which participants encounter the proverbs through elemental materials. I'm now developing that cycle with my co-author, Dr Hasmidar from Universiti Brunei Darussalam, into a 100-page compendium: a creative translation of the research into a hand-bound, limited-edition publication.
Other cycles are moving towards their own creative translation through exhibitions and performances, and further cycles are in development. The aim across all of it stays the same: not to display heritage, but to return to people the capacity to want it, handle it and carry it forward.
What are you reading, watching, or listening to now, that is helping you to stay relaxed and positive?
Lately I’ve been reading deeply into the Southeast Asian world and its sensibilities, looking for the ordinary and the mundane we tend to overlook, the things that carry the soul and memory essential to the sustainability of our communities.
One book I keep with me almost everywhere is David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. It stays close because it reaches for the same kind of knowledge my work does: meaning that lives in the body and the senses.
This carries into the music I listen to as well. I’m open to most things, but I always find myself returning to traditional Indonesian music and to Indonesian records from the 70s and 80s, which bring memories of my grandmother back to me.
I have also been studying the work of architects whose practice rests on the poetics of building, how they study memory and translate it into design. Tsuyoshi Tane is one of them. His “archaeology of the future,” where design begins by excavating the memory of a place, feels close to what I’m reaching for.
How long have you been part of IKT?
I joined IKT only recently, so I’m still at an early stage in the relationship. What drew me to it was the chance to place a practice rooted in Southeast Asia within a wider international community of curators, to be in conversation across contexts rather than working in isolation. Even at this early stage, that sense of a shared field has been valuable: it situates the specificities of my work within a broader dialogue, and I expect its real benefit to my practice will unfold over time through the connections and exchanges it makes possible.
Thank you Hamlatul!
Learn more about Hamlatul and her work: Instagram
Spotlight
The Spotlight series features short interviews with IKT members, offering insight into their work, ideas, and professional contexts. Through these conversations, we highlight the diverse practices, perspectives, and experiences that make up the IKT community, while creating opportunities for members to discover shared interests, find inspiration, and connect with potential collaborators.
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