Anne Samat’s Freedom 3 … from Fear and Freedom 4 … of Speech represent a gendered pair of bodies. They are characteristic of the artist’s visual vocabulary: the wall-bound assemblages are constructed out of various craft-based artifacts and found objects, evoking the abstracted form of a human anatomy. While incorporating a broad range of everyday objects, from rakes to kitchen implements to cutlery, the works also feature salient craft elements. The central core of the figures – the “hearts” – were created using the songket technique practiced primarily in the east coast regions of peninsular Malaysia. She has replaced the use of gold and silver threads with metal forks and short wooden sticks, creating a train of these objects by interweaving them, weft-wise, with the threads. The artist cuts a unique figure among a younger generation of Malaysian artists. Anne Samat underwent gender reassignment surgery in in her twenties, and has lived as a woman since then. She has stated that her Malay-Muslim identity, however complicated by her personal life choices, informs her artistic practice in fundamental ways; “roots”, to use her term of choice, features as a central trope in her work. That understanding is complicated by Anne’s transgendered identity. According to the artist: “I am determined to bring weaving into a contemporary context and surpass its association as a simple domestic activity. I seek to empower women’s identity within the domestic environment. By deliberately employing traditional weaving techniques and juxtaposing it with these modern-day readymade objects, I explore ideas of the domestic and the handmade versus the industrial.”
