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Moad Musbahi

air cut into song 01: A Broken Sky, 2022
air cut into song 02: The Wind Between Two Winds, 2022
air cut into song 03: The Nat. Radio Weather Channel, 2022
air cut into song 04: Rainy Days (instrumental), 2022
Singapore Biennale 2022 Commission

air cut into song is a collaborative project comprising of four installations, which explores the history of reading the weather. The installations are presented across two Biennale venues. The installation at Lazarus Island acts as a transmitter that reads the weather, while the installation at Tanjong Pagar Distripark receives and broadcasts the weather report. Alongside the installations, a series of weather reports are showcased. The reports span from 1869, when the first measurement of rainfall in Singapore were recorded, to 2019, when the first numerical weather prediction model specifically designed for the Southern Asian region was operational. This project is a collaborative effort between Moad Musbahi; Huruf, a type and design collective; Ejin Sha, an independent graphic designer; Flora Weil, a design engineer and artist; Sukanta Majumdar, an independent audiographer and sound artist; and Nat Radio Weather Correspondents, Part 1 of 2: Aanchal Malhotra, Jerry C. Zee, Sabeen Chaudhry, Farouk Yahya, and Esra Musbahi. Part 2 coming soon.


BIOS
Moad Musbahi is an artist and curator. His practice investigates migration as a method for cultural production and political expression and focuses on the social practices and forms of knowledge that displacement engenders. Musbahi explores these ideas through video works, exhibition-making and writing.

Flora Weil is a design engineer and artist who is interested in exploring new narratives around the development of emerging technologies and challenging human centrality within the fields of design and science. For the past three years, she has led interdisciplinary projects with scientists from Tokyo to bridge academic research with new products and platforms.

Sukanta Majumdar is an independent audiographer and sound artist who specialises in field recording and sound design for films and theatre. A graduate of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute of India in Kolkata, he has worked with many renowned filmmakers at home and abroad. He and Moushumi Bhowmik are the co-creator of The Travelling Archive, a project in ethnomusicological field recording and archiving.

Huruf is a type and design collective that seeks to encourage awareness of and discourse on typography in Malaysia. Huruf has developed projects that investigate vernacular typography, local typographic heritage and multilingualism. Working at the intersection of design and pedagogy, Huruf is active in organising workshops and talks to facilitate knowledge exchange among type enthusiasts. Founded by Tan Sueh Li in 2017, Huruf has since grown to include an eclectic mix of creatives including Low Hsin Yin, Tan Zi Hao, David Ho Ming Aun, Fam Kai-Cong and Louie Lee Wei Yi. Tan Sueh Li is a type designer and educator from Malaysia who graduated from the Type and Media Masters programme at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. With an interest in searching for Malaysia's unique identity in type and typography, she founded Huruf. She also runs hrftype, a type design studio that specialises in multi-script typography and font development.

Low Hsin Yin is a multidisciplinary visual designer from Malaysia who focuses on typographic design solutions. With a belief in lifelong learning, she teaches graphic design courses at local institutions.

Tan Zi Hao is an artist, writer and researcher. His ideas have taken shape across a diverse range of topics involving language politics, interpretive etymology, mythical chimeras and natureculture assemblage. He holds a PhD in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and is currently a lecturer at Multimedia University.

Fam Kai-Cong is a graphic and type designer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds a postgraduate certificate in Type Design from the Type@Cooper Condensed Program. Currently, his design practice is focused on finding the balance in—and the tensions that arise from—using type as a vessel for communication and for expression.David Ho is a graphic, packaging and type designer based in Kuala Lumpur. He enjoys exploring interdisciplinary intersections within different fields of design, believing in the merit of multitudes. He also has a soft spot for hand-painted vernacular signage.

Louie Lee Wei Yi is a multidisciplinary designer, who has a wide range of skills and experience in Creative and Environmental Graphic Design. She is also an amateur type designer who crafts and draws type at her leisure.

Ejin Sha is a graphic designer and was trained at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Sha established her practice in 2017 and has helped brands, individuals and institutions to develop their unique visual voice and communicate their narratives. Outside of her design practice, Sha explores the intersections between imagination, memory and identity using vernacular objects presented in large-scale installations and interactive artworks. Her works have been exhibited at LEEUM Museum of Art (Korea) and art festivals like Urbanscapes (Malaysia) and Dutch Design Week. She currently lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Special Thanks

For ‘A Broken Sky’
Jeffrey Gough
Claire Weil
Particle Studio
Max Blake
Hairie Aidil
Muhd Afiq Danial
Hidayatullah
Muhammad Noraiman
Rashed Raj
Lakisha Jayasinghe

For ‘Nat. Radio Channel’
Shabbir Mustafa
Selene Yap
Wong Bing-Hao

For ‘Rainy Days’
Michael Laffan


INFORMATION

  • air cut into song 01: A Broken Sky. 2022. Aluminium, steel, acrylic, electrical cabling, loop radio antenna and radios. Dimensions variable.
  • air cut into song 02: The Wind Between Two Winds. 2022. Live-relay camera, single channel video and internet server. Dimensions variable.
  • air cut into song 03: The Nat. Radio Weather Channel. 2022. Two channel sound installation. Dimensions variable.
  • air cut into song 04: Rainy Days (instrumental). 2022. Copper. Dimensions variable.