Paul Nickson Atia was an artist in residence at Rimbun Dahan for three months, from mid-July to mid-October 2022.
About the Artist
Paul Nickson Atia (b. 1992, Sarawak; lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is a young artist from Malaysia. His primary interest lies in converging theories and conceptual frameworks of arts, architecture, history, anthropology, culture, the geopolitics and identities in contemporary art practice and narratives. His third and most recent solo exhibition in 2022, ‘Counting Silence, Filling Space, Weaving Conversation’ at Rissim Contemporary affirms his vision of modular painting – over a hundred canvases, painting a myriad of squares, reflecting on his interest in time, modularity, and autonomy that informed his practice. Paul holds a degree in architecture, practicing and teaching locally for several years before turning his artistic pursuit towards drawings, paintings, and art installations.
https://www.instagram.com/nicksonpaul/
https://www.rissim.com/artists/35-paul-nickson-atia/overview/
About the residency
Torun Tanaʔ – There Is Something About Home
I began my residency in Rimbun Dahan while having my solo exhibition happening concurrently. The initial thought was for the residency to be a ‘thinking space’ to develop the Perhimpunan/Assembly project; a project conceptualized in 2019 that would speculate the encounter between a Dayak Man and a Renaissance Man – a dialogue between traditions and values with the ideals of contemporaneity and modernity.
During my time at the residency, I mainly worked with paintings as studies. These paintings are informed by the associative and metaphorical connections drawn towards the subject of my identity that I framed as structural and relational memories. Torun Tanaʔ is a phrase in the Bidayuh Jagoi dialect that translates into jungle/forest (torun) and land (tanaʔ); often associated with the idea of home, belonging, and place of origin or more aptly, homeland, that sets the more semantic approach towards the body of work. The visuals and figures represented in the painting studies are characterized by entirely personal narratives and stories of homeland.
I seek to tell the narratives of Torun Tanaʔ through stories passed down to me and recollection of my personal memories of walking and working the land with my family and relatives. The images and visuals are of ladders, vertical and A-frame-like structures for farming, structures built for drying laundry (commonly made from slender trees or bamboo), and other structures like the four (4) main pillars of the Bidayuh headhouse, Baruk – a reference towards the points of assembly and congregation for this body of work. Another significant reference is the Bung Bratak or Mount Bratak in Bau; the original ancestral settlement of Bidayuh elders of the Jagoi-Bratak origins for now over 40 main villages in Bau, Lundu, and Kuching.
In the final month of my residency, I built the structures resembling ladders that appear in the Obsesi/Obsession series (2019) and the current Perhimpunan/Assembly series (2022). Using wooden stilts as the base, the ladder structure is wrapped with melted plastic waste that I have been hoarding over the past years – a habit that I find amusingly weird but a norm, and the immediate and perhaps impulsive reaction towards the then critical and daring decision made by the government to ship over 450 tonne of plastic waste back to their country of origin. I adopted the photography technique David Hockney used with the polaroid camera and prints called ‘joiners’ to photograph the structure at various sites around Rimbun Dahan.
Apart from its rather commonly known metaphorical and rhetorical reference as an uphill journey and gradual ascent for something, I cannot quite pinpoint the significance of any of the ladders in my paintings until very recently after I finished building the 3-part ladder structure. Only towards the final week when assembling all the works done throughout the residency for documentation that I realized that it presents to me as a body and a structure of my own story and identity, of my own roots and homeland – memories of watching my family harvesting the crops and the fruits of the trees, and the hardships of taking care of the ‘home’, that the ladder has always been present.
Torun Tanaʔ is a mindscape and a repository of memory for Perhimpunan/Assembly project, and I am forever grateful for Rimbun Dahan, being my first art residency, to have given the opportunity to develop this project.
