About
Adin has spent over a decade teaching the Malay language and ceaselessly wondering why words, histories and identities refuse to stay neatly compartmentalised.
An educator, cultural advocate and researcher of contemporary Southeast Asian art, she is particularly interested in language, text, temporality and the afterlives of cultural memory.
Her current research follows Jawi into contemporary art, tracing how an old script can carry several pasts into the present—and occasionally trouble the stories we have grown accustomed to telling about ourselves.
Through her work, she hopes to contribute to Southeast Asian art histories that begin from the region itself, including those that have been overlooked, misplaced or simply waiting to be read again.
Chronotextual Ruptures: Reimagining Jawi in contemporary Nusantara art
Once the primary writing system across the Malay Archipelago (Nusantara), Jawi today is frequently reduced to a marker of Malay-Muslim identity or confined to the domains of religion, heritage and cultural memory.
This paper argues that contemporary Nusantara artists challenge these conventional understandings by mobilising Jawi as a heterotemporal medium through which accumulated historical meanings are reactivated to engage contemporary sociopolitical concerns.
Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck's concept of the horizon of expectation together with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Keith Moxey and George Kubler's theories of heterotemporality, the paper proposes the concept of chronotextual rupture to describe moments in which inherited meanings embedded within Jawi encounter present realities, producing temporal disjunctions that make alternative futures imaginable.
Through formal and contextual analyses of artworks by Ezzam Rahman (Singapore), Tan Zi Hao (Malaysia), and Arahmaiani (Indonesia), the paper identifies three manifestations of chronotextual rupture: localised ruptures that negotiate identity and belonging, structural ruptures that destabilise sociolinguistic hierarchies and national narratives, and macrotemporal ruptures that reactivate Jawi's historical role as a medium of regional and transregional exchange.
In doing so, the paper offers chronotextual rupture as a new framework for understanding how historical scripts function as active temporal media in contemporary art.
Professional practice
Adin’s professional practice moves between education, language and art-historical research.
More than a decade in the classroom has shaped an approach grounded in curiosity, dialogue and the belief that language is never simply a tool for communication, but a living repository of the people, histories and ideas that pass through it.
This sensibility extends into her research practice, where she approaches artworks not as isolated objects but as sites through which larger questions of history, identity and belonging can be asked.
Her work is particularly attentive to perspectives that emerge from within Southeast Asia, and to the possibilities of bringing knowledge from the classroom, cultural practice and academic research into conversation with one another.
Reframing Narratives: Asian Art Histories Conference 2026
Chronotextual Ruptures: Reimagining Jawi in Contemporary Nusantara Art
Presented thesis research on contemporary artistic engagements with Jawi, introducing “chronotextual rupture” as a framework for examining the intersections of historical scripts, cultural memory, and contemporary sociopolitical concerns.
Aparupa Saha
Krystle Huan
