Iman Alternative

Iman Alternative (2025)

man Alternative (2025)

of modern Malay femininity, absurd, exhausted, holy, and defiant.

The surreal resilience that emerges when survival itself becomes performance.

By collapsing the sacred with the industrial, symbols of modesty and devotion are entangled with tools of industry, intertwining faith and femininity as both burden and sustenance.

The work reflects on how modern ideas of development and capital continue to extract from our identities and bodies. It asks how we might return to alternative foundations within faith and conviction of the self — ones that are more ecological, matriarchal, and sustaining. How might women be fuelled rather than depleted?

It also turns toward the suppressed legacies of Nusantara feminine mysticism, ancestral reservoirs of spiritual power that remain feared, dismissed, or silenced. Their obscured presence points to the dual existence of Malay-Muslim women: the visible performance of modesty and expected conformity, and the unseen undercurrents of spiritual potency and resistance.

Here, faith is framed not as static doctrine but as elastic, improvisational, and alive, capable of holding resistance, humour, and survival at the core of muslim women’s realities.

Special thanks to the girls and the team that worked on this together with me, to which this wouldn't be possible,

@dayanayahya

@irinedaris

@eridiata

@insyirahiszarizal

@nebularbabe

Shooting team:

HighkeyFlair Studio

@whoisshiyan

@aidan.at

Wardrobe:

1930's silk Baju kurung

Gift from @Johnang