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| An Exhibition That Maps Sarawak’s Cultural Pluralism Through the Human Gaze. |
By: Davidsal Jimmy Berayen
A portrait exhibition at Pustaka Negeri Sarawak, Miri, brings Sarawak’s diverse communities into focus, revealing stories of memory, identity, and belonging through the power of the human gaze.
The exhibition brings together portraits of individuals from Malay, Kenyah, Bidayuh, Penan, and Iban communities, each rendered with careful attention to cultural detail. Traditional attire becomes more than ornament.
Ceremonial garments worn during harvest festivals, intricate beadwork believed to ward off malevolent spirits, and symbolic accessories rooted in ancestral cosmologies are painted with reverence rather than spectacle.
What emerges is not a catalogue of ethnic difference, but a map of coexistence.
By placing these portraits side by side, the exhibition allows Sarawak’s plural identities to speak in conversation. Differences are visible, but so are shared expressions—dignity, resilience, and quiet strength. The paintings resist exoticism. They do not frame indigenous identities as relics of the past, but as living presences shaped by continuity and change.
In this way, the canvas becomes communal space. Art becomes a meeting point where multiple histories stand together, without hierarchy, without reduction.
Beyond the Surface: When Art at Pustaka Negeri Sarawak Turns Faces into Living Archives
More than an art display, Faces of Sarawak is an invitation to slow down.
Set within the civic spaces of Pustaka Negeri Sarawak, Miri, the exhibition subtly transforms the building into a gallery of remembrance. Visitors are encouraged to pause—to look again, and then look deeper. The experience is deliberately unhurried, resisting the quick consumption of images so common in the digital age.
Here, faces function as living archives. They store memory not in text, but in expression. They preserve identity not through declaration, but through presence. In a time when many local cultures face erosion from economic pressure, environmental loss, and cultural homogenization, these portraits stand as acts of quiet resistance.
They ask a simple but profound question: what does it mean to truly see one another?
Open to the public, Faces of Sarawak: Where Every Gaze Holds a Story welcomes everyone—not as spectators alone, but as participants in a shared act of recognition. To encounter these faces is to encounter Sarawak itself: complex, plural, and deeply human.
