Act 07: ANATOMY OF PAIN

Design Statement ​
​
In term of Science, Anatomy is the branch of Biology concerned with the structure of organisms and their parts. Between the portrait of a main motherly figure and the shelter she provides as a mid-wife, nurse, communist sympathizer, this attempt to deconstruct her persona into an anatomy of apparatus, each is but a signifier of her internal organs signified the perpetual abuse, torment, raped, violation that has been displayed by the aggressor upon its victim. Such apparatus fragility, temporal, aged, morbidity are ever present making up the entirety of her life story as a narration, dialogue, scripts, acts that one passes through as an assemblage of spaces between, within, above these internal organs appeared before the observers as apparatus of Kuhnnian’s post-scientific paradigm.

She is Sybil Kathigasu. A forgotten heroine of British Empire that the Neo-Malay dominant “Ketuanan” Malaysia desperate to forget by exclusion from the Malayan His-Story, almost unheard of in the history textbook of secondary school of Malaysia. Deconstructing this narration takes the following fragments into play, namely the Ego and Persona, the Para-Noia and the End-Noia, aligned against the Jungian’s psychology as its underlying philosophy to deconstruct an idea as in ideation. The ideas elongate from the devote service of Sybil by providing medication, treatment and information when requested to the MPAJA. Those acts were, at the time, considered criminal and high subversive by the military administration of Japan in Malaya. She had faced one difficulty after another with bravery and dedication. She’s a war heroine who was tortured and beaten up and she survived it all.

To deconstruct this descriptive installation from the book “Faces of Courage’ by Norma Miraflor and Ian Ward, Sybil Kathigasu’s story is more than a historical tale, it’s an encounter of sacrifices, services and pains that built up an egocentric heroism. The free standing deconstruct intent to conclude her , persona and perpetual abuse into human anatomy in laboratory apparatus, which inseparable to the main motherly figure she provides as nurse covertly supplied to locals during World War II, especially the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army hiding out in the surrounding hills with medical even she knowing fully well the consequences and never divulged information about the resistance movement. By the same token, these laboratory apparatus resembled a body, which to conclude her pain towards what and how she stimulated, protected, healed to the locals. The organs in body beyond boundaries, the blood vessels in body, remind us that the movement of Sybil in life gave the ultimate sacrifice to the nation in order that we may live in peace and security. It pays tribute to human integrity and courage in the face of adversity.