Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? / Sila Mengkanibalkan kami mahu tak? [Book]

Produced as an extension to the exhibition ‘Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? Sila Mengkanibalkan Kami MahuTak?’ (NUS Museum, Singapore, August 2013 – May 2014) the book extends the ideas within the exhibition around the possibilities and problematics of aesthetic cannibalism in relation to the historic and displaced object. Digital repatriation as artistic gesture, active readership of historic/received narratives and museological issues around interpretation, performing artefacts, and exhibitionary tropes are encountered through the specificity of the Malayan museum and its post-colonial afterlife. Through the incorporation of multiple voices, locations and positions, the book also speaks across and through these specifics to notions of the copy, the remake, revisiting, re-use and to approaches which seek to re-question the museological and anthropological notions of ‘source community’ and ‘local informant’ through the voice of the artist and audience. A series of commissioned essays, archival collections, exhibition documentation and ‘intertextual dialogues’ form the basis of the book alongside the artist’s work. Contributors include individuals from a range of disciplines and institutions including curators, artists, art historians, archivists, and librarians working across Singapore, Malaysia, America, Europe and the UK.