Nuriman Putra Bin Zainal


website
Born in Singapore.

All his life, Nuriman has been fascinated by romantic visuals and how the world is represented through the eyes of others. In his quest for simplicity, Nuriman engage in projects that explore overlooked occurrences in everyday movements and unfamiliar aspects of routine gestures. These instances become apparent from the vantage point of his own embodied perception. Often inspired by romantic paintings and conceptual movements in art, Nuriman tries to carry the feeling of "mono no aware" in his projects. 

Nuriman earned his Diploma in Fine Art from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 2021. He is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Fine Art at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, conferred by the University of the Arts London. In 2024, Nuriman exhibited his work at the Photographic Society of Singapore, Menagerie 2024, as part of Unit 4 Showcase. In 2025, his collaborative work was selected for NAFA Open House 2025. He has also showcased at the SeniKita Exhibition by Kamal Arts Gallery, 2023. During his second year of diploma studies in 2019, Nuriman participated in a collaboration between NAFA and Singapore General Hospital titled ‘From Fears to Dreams’.My current research examines ontological insecurity as a foundational framework for unpacking identity and state(s) of being. I look into the topic that is peculiarly situated between materiality and immateriality, spirituality and practicality, semiotic and linguistic. My practice is grounded in the deliberate repositioning and reinterpretation of familiar objects located within my vicinity, forming an immediate response to my environment via poetic-symbolic expression. In its most positive connotation, I view liberty in dabbling the field of art, philosophy, music, and sports, and often times these result in an extension of my embodied experience. Imaginative landscapes are thus created from a cross-dsciplinary image-making practice explores the unknown while still being anchored in the resolved. 



Title: The Weight of Light and Nothingness (the turn)
Year: 2026
Medium: Masking tape, soil, sand, tablecloth, privacy film, phototransfer on plexiglass.
Statement:

Nuriman explores image-making processes that are at once willed and accidental. His research is grounded on an enquiry that is peculiarly situatued between being and non-being, materiality and immateriality, the semiotic and the linguistic. Within this tension, ordinary materials are treated as carriers of latent sacrality, in dialogue with Fluxus processes and Surrealist strategies of estrangement. Conceptually, the research draws on Roland Barthes’ theorisation of the photographic message, particularly the co-existence of denotation and connotation in the image, and on André Breton’s articulation of Surrealist imagery as a site where the real and the marvellous collide. This practice treats light and time as structuring conditions through which tangible elements form assemblages: a critical meditation on how myths and truths are materially, temporally, and perspectively constructed within overlapping information realities.