Born in Malacca, Malaysia in 1963, Ahmad Abu Bakar moved to Singapore as a child. Today, he is recognised for his multi-disciplinary approach to artmaking and has produced works across a wide range of media including ceramics, installation, video, photography and performance. Filofax was made during a time when the artist, lacking access to kilns, took a break from working with ceramics and began to experiment with found objects, often producing works that dealt with themes of urbanization and the rise of materialistic values and consumerism. The work makes direct references to the artist’s immediate environment and explores the implications of urbanisation on human values and modern life. It shows a hand painted box-grid time ‘Filofax’ planner, filled with the artist’s drawings, placed inside a wire mesh cage. The artist was drawn to the Filofax—a personal time organization system commonly used for planning meetings, project deadlines and for organizing financial records—as a system of control, as a tool that can both programme reality and ‘tame time’. In 1994, he wrote: “Everything has to be planned in order to cope with the onslaught – the rush of the urban man (consider social and economic planning right to the family life). At the same time, it becomes an authority of time, defining a person’s movement and being. The Filofax has become an important tool for the urban professional and the urban dweller. However, you ought to feel controlled by this kind [of] system.”
