Publication | The Sufi and The Bearded Man: Remembering a Keramat in Contemporary Singapore

Contents

Foreword | Ahmad Mashadi
Listening to Leaves: Historical Memory of a Keramat in Contemporary Singapore | Teren Sevea
“She’s Still Here”: A Recollection | Nurul Huda 

Confessional Curation | Shabbir Hussain Mustafa

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“In pairing Sufi and the Bearded Man alongside Camping and Tramping, reflections into these questions of 'roles and limits' are hopefully rendered significant, demonstrating the dynamics and contraints of museological practice, referenced to its sense of universal burden and contingencies.  In some ways, the composition of the project team - consisting of Nurul Huda B A Rashid, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa and Teren Sevea, working alongside the caretakers of the shrine - marked such predicaments. Terenjit's accounting of the shrine's history and its community proposes urgency in the face of contemporary religious and institutional attitudes towards sufis and keramats. For Terenjit, even as this project attempts to introduce to a general audience the significance of Siti Maryam' shrine, its service to the issues of heritage and loss may well still be elusive. Within the context of an art museum, this anxiety takes on a particular dimension. The photographic documentations by Nurul and the curation by Mustafa could not have been undertaken without a sense of self-reflexivity, struggling with the mediated nature of the museum experience even as they insist on the significant and the real.”

- EXTRACT from Ahmad Mashadi, “Foreword” in The Sufi and The Bearded Man: Re-membering a Keramat in Contemporary Singapore, NUS Museum, 2011.

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