'Migration' is an interactive installation artwork that was commissioned specially for the Langkawi Art Biennale 2014 by ArtMalaysia. The artwork reflects on the gradual natural exchange between humans in terms of culture and identity, and how migration acts as an instigator or catalyst to this open ended change process. This piece touches on aspects of culture, identity, equality, change, exchange, assimilation, accommodation, adaptation, internal intangibles, natural flow, and creation of the new.
Viewers were invited to interact with the artwork by freely spooning out the coloured beads to add or mix to other beads in any other dish on the table. As the colours were 'migrated' over time from one bowl to the next, the colours in the beads would diffuse from one bead to another, blending and creating new colours; at first colours that could be easily identified, and later colours we may not know what to call.
The interaction of different viewers randomly created an unpredictable, open-ended outcome in producing a large variety of new colours and mixtures; drawing a parallel with how as different individuals migrate to and from a space, we change each other by meeting each other, and we are also changed by the spaces we enter. Random individuals and interactions thereby create together an unpredictable outcome in terms of culture and identity.
Visitors curious to see the results of their participation could visit the ‘Migration’ Project section of the artist's website, where pictures of the installation progress were updated live on a daily basis throughout the duration of the biennale.