Nadhirah Khalid

Nadhirah Khalid (b.1995) is a Fine Arts Undergrad from LASALLE College of the Arts. She is an aspiring creative who seeks to address women's issues, body and identity politics in her works. Enamoured with the morbid, monstrous and the macabre, she draws from horror cinema and the female abject as a means to further investigate these social issues and contest for self-authorship of the body.

Currently, Nadhirah is invested in experimenting with film as a platform, intent in subverting this male-dominated medium, to inscribe more inclusive and diverse narratives.

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I won’t shut up

Ninth Series +

23 May 2020

Online

I won’t shut up is an open confrontation to Sunat Perempuan (Female Genital Mutilation), created in response to a video made by Nadhirah’s aunt, who demonstrates her clitoral circumcision using a pair of scissors and a piece of paper. As an extension of Nadhirah’s Final Year Project in LASALLE, I won’t shut up reflects her ongoing research into gendered purification rites and its role in the regulation of female bodies within the local Malay-Muslim community.

Highlighting the violation felt in the face of extreme policing and regulation of her body, the work addresses a loss in identity and as a result, reveals a desire to reconstruct a lost voice. In this performance, repetitive and meditative gestures represent re-affirming attempts in re-inscribing the body and the self - serving as an act of reconciliation with a disembodied experience.