Maryam Binte Tayeb


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Maryam Binte Tayeb (b. 2003, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist working across writing, performance, and photography. Rooted in her Malay heritage, her practice examines the body as a site of memory, tension, and inherited belief. Her work navigates social conditioning, emotional contradiction, and the ways love becomes entangled with control, silence, and expectation within local landscapes.

Her work navigates social conditioning, emotional contradiction, and the ways love becomes entangled with control, silence, and expectation in local landscapes. Her work integrates themes of family, religion, immaterialism, suppressed memory, sexuality, and behavioral psychology; using the body as a tool to both subject and witness. Through visual art and performance, Maryam explores inherited ways of loving and belonging. Her practice resists resolution, holding space for discomfort, ambiguity, and the aftermath of tainted love.

Maryam holds a Diploma in Interaction Design from Nanyang Polytechnic and is currently pursuing an Honours Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at Nanyang Academy of Fine Art(NAFA). She previously worked as a UX/UI designer at KPMG Singapore and completed a residency at Studio Plesungan, Solo, Indonesia, in 2025.
Maryam’s practice engages object–subject ontology to examine how relationships, emotions, and bodies shift between being held, acted upon, and acting in return. Working across performance, writing, photography, and poetry, she translates stories of love and fractured tenderness into gestures, images, and texts where objects become carriers of memory, intimacy, and absence. As she believes love is treated not as a private sentiment but as a performative structure shaped by power, timing, and cultural expectation, her works invite viewers to witness love as an ongoing negotiation between bodies, objects, language, and lived experience. 


Title: jauh di mata, dekat di hati (far from the eyes, close to the heart)
Year: 2026
Medium: wall mirror, window film, photography on tracing paper
Statement:

Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage and Judith Butler’s gender performativity, the mirror functions as a site of recognition and disconnection. This tension reflects the Malay phrase jauh di mata, dekat di hati (far from the eyes, close to the heart), where distance and intimacy coexist as a lived paradox. The tinted mirror creates encounters between past and present Selves, particularly between the child and the adult. By collapsing subject and object, the work examines how identity, care, and healing emerge through separation and absence. Maryam’s practice engages object–subject ontology to explore how bodies, emotions, and relationships shift. Working across performance, writing, photography, and poetry, she frames love as a performative structure that is shaped as a witness.