Iman Alternative

Iman Alternative (2025)

A mythic theatre of modern Malay femininity, absurd, exhausted, holy, and defiant.

It challenges how faith, fashion, conformity, and survival intersect, while carving out space for Muslim women to imagine new, resistant forms of devotion and identity.

By collapsing the sacred with the industrial, the work critiques how women’s faith and bodies are treated as extractive resources. Symbols of modesty and devotion are entangled with tools of industry, exposing femininity as both burden and sustenance, while revealing the surreal resilience that emerges when survival itself becomes performance.

The figures inside the car underscore this tension between visibility and concealment. The shadowed women behind the veiled figures evoke 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.

The mysticism of the Malay woman is not discarded but brought into collision with devotion set against the extractive backdrop of modern industry. 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