At GlogauAIR, Marie Malar investigates the ritual practices of France and Malaysia, her homelands, to create an image repertoire reflecting her inner topography.

Her exploration of French imagery, rooted in daytime and drawing on the Catholic imagination, incorporates childhood impressions of life in the French countryside to form work imparting a personal relationship with the divine. Meanwhile, night becomes the cover under which her study of Malaysian imagery takes place. It is, as Phillipe Charlier notes in Rituals, “the moment when spirits roam […] where human nature is in parentheses”. A focal point lies in the ritual of dressing, and how potent a vehicle it was for the transmission of her maternal heritage. She is further compelled by the wealth of class signifiers embedded in sartorial choices, and the impact of British colonialism on Malaysian fashion.

Through the creation of a series of trance-like moving images exploring these two sides of her heritage, she abstracts overt religious symbols and rituals in hopes of generating a cinematic language that feels spectral and sacred. She is guided by the notion of the visible revealing the invisible, and of images acting as openings or passages. She considers Paul Schrader’s essay on transcendental cinema, where he speaks of “purify[ing] the image by gradually converting it into an expressive image”. She investigates why abstracted forms seem to her more spiritually resonant than representational ones.

Her current art practice takes these theoretical concepts and confronts them with material realities: her time at GlogauAIR represents the initial stages of a search for a visual language that inches toward the sacred.