Berdoalah Untuk Kesejahteraan Nusantara examples Izat Arif’s introduction of linoleum as both medium and message for the critical potential of everyday design and objects.

The linoleum mat is a material with an inseparable connotation to Malaysian lower- to middle-class households, an affordable cheap vinyl material for interior furnishing with prints that imitate more luxurious surfaces, like marble or wood (as employed in this work).

In the artist’s treatment of linoleum, however, he experiments with its potential to speak and to create form. Linoleum cutouts spell out a prayer for the wellbeing of the Nusantara, a hand emerges in prayer to support a palm tree. They decorate a larger banner, echoing the designs of government-issued banners—another format that attaches itself to the socio-political landscape of contemporary Malaysia.

Izat’s appropriation of these cultural icons of the Malaysian landscape is not to transform their meanings and purposes, but rather to employ their familiarity and cultural baggage as a medium par excellence for conveying social messages in contemporary art: it is the necessary tension between a medium’s social history and their introduction into a contemporary art context that drives his critique.