About the Exhibition
What happens when information stops being a broadcast and becomes a buffet? This exhibition—and the essay that accompanies it—begins with the Cold War megaphones of Washington and Moscow, moves through the digital explosion of the 21st century, and lands in Malaysia, where faith, race, and algorithmic feeds filter our view of West Asia.
The argument is simple but urgent. Propaganda once flowed from a single source: state broadcasters, a handful of newspapers, a central megaphone. Today, we are surrounded by an endless buffet of images, headlines, and viral clips. We are told we have freedom of choice, but the architecture of the buffet—its algorithms, its emotional seasoning, its demand for speed—controls what we swallow.
For Malaysian audiences, this is especially acute. Our solidarity with Palestine, our segmented media landscape, and our obsessive social media use mean we consume West Asian conflicts not as distant news, but as partly digested, emotionally charged fragments. The artists in “Propaganda Buffet” (Ahmad Fuad Osman, Zulkifli Lee, Haslin Ismail, and others) do not offer counter-propaganda. Instead, they jam the signal—slowing down the scroll, exposing hidden frames, restoring human specificity to flattened archetypes.
Their duty is not to answer, but to complicate. To help us chew without being swallowed.
Participating Artists: -AHMAD SYAHRUL -EDROGER ROSILI -FUAD ARIF -AHMAD FUAD OSMAN -AZLAN MAM -HAFIDZUDDIN AZIZ -SYAKIR HASHIM -ROHAIZAD SHAARI -HASLIN ISMAIL -ARIF FAUZAN OTHMAN -TIKWEI -RINI FAUZAN -MEME -ZULKIFLI LEE