Nurul Atiqah Binte Zaidi


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Nurul Atiqah Zaidi is a Singaporean interdisciplinary performance artist whose movement practice emerges from embodied research. Working through the Malay female body, she engages the body as archive and explores performance as an epistemic methodology. She has performed in Singapore, London, and Indonesia, and is currently in her final year pursuing a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts at Nanyang Academy of Fine Art. Atiqah holds a Diploma in Art Teaching from the same alma mater.

Atiqah is a part of the academy’s Talent Development Programme, she has received multiple Dean’s List Awards, and served as Lead Curator of her cohort from 2025–2026.

Atiqah runs 'She Her You and I', an intersectional Feminist space dedicated to spotlighting emerging women creatives in Singapore, and spearheads 'Perempuan in Print', an independent publication focused on dissecting print culture, body politics, gendered media and nusantaran women-archives.

Her works and performances have been presented at NUS Museum, Objectifs, Art Outreach, Studio Plesungan, and P7:1SMA. Atiqah has been featured in Her World Singapore (print edition, October 2025 online article, January 2026). My research examines fetish as a technology of power through which the female body is produced as an object of desire, regulation, and consumption. Focusing on Malay women’s bodies, I trace how eroticisation operates not only through visual regimes but through language, sound, and affective gesture. Onomatopoeic utterances circulating within digital culture appear playful and spontaneous, yet function as micro-acts of capture, collapsing desire into dominance. These affective gestures are embedded within longer colonial histories of representation, where Southeast Asian women were rendered exotic, legible, and consumable through photographic, ethnographic, and archival frameworks. In this continuum, language replaces the gaze, but performs the same work of possession.

My practice reclaims movement as a counter-gesture within this economy of fetish, reproducing erotic anti-spectacle embodiments of refusal that disrupts the logic of consumption. Drawing from affect theory, my research looks at the body as a site where power is felt, negotiated, and contested before it is named.

Against the fetishistic demand for visibility, my practice privileges utilising post-performance relics and indices. These relics function as counter-archives of embodied knowledge, insisting on presence without surrendering to consumption. In doing so, my practice reframes the Malay female body not as a passive surface of inscription, but as an active agent that generates knowledge, resists, and bites back.



Title: Portrait of a Seething Malay Woman
Year: 2026
Medium: Lightbox, GIGIT (Bite) Post-Performance Relics, Onomatopoeic GIGIT (Bite) Index on Ipad
Statement:

Atiqah's research considers post-performance indices as an affective structure through which the Malay female body is rendered legible. By employing onomatopoeia as an indexing strategy, her practice examines how sensation is translated into language and organised within systematic frameworks. Drawing from decolonial and affect theory, the research interrogates classificatory logics that historically flatten racialised bodies into fetishised signs. The arrangement of bites as both index and sentence destabilises the authority of archival order, revealing its dependence on affective extraction. Rather than rejecting structure, her research inhabits and reconfigures it, proposing the bite as a disruptive unit that allows sensation to exceed containment and reassert bodily agency.