“We started with an artist centric view and we were a group of artists that wanted to have exhibitions,”
Enter: Kaleidoscope Studio. The gallery came out of a need to drive more variety and different art forms. Nur Khalisah realised that there was a need for the local art scene to expand beyond its traditional forms because there was room for more variety of art.
It all began about two years ago with a strong focus on physical art such as paintings, before moving on to other art forms such as poetry and musical performances. Now, the gallery has expanded the space to include community events and other expressions of creativity. Kaleidoscope shows that the artists are not alone – art is also communicated as an important part in the quality of life.
The gallery is planning to move by end of the year with a vision to do a lot of community stuff, like grounded arts community – telling stories about Brunei, giving Brunei culture a little more identity. Future projects will also focus on urban issues – the city’s urban art forms – how people perceive it and how artists perceive it and the issues involved with that. The one thing you can be sure of is Kaleidoscope wants to bring out more originality.
Examples of Artists work displayed –
We don’t have super regular artists’ piece displayed but at the moment we have Wilson Mc Lau, Nina Zainal, Hariz Khalid, Redzuan Rusli, Azmina Ahmad, Faiz Morshidi, Zainal Abidin, Temperatie (to name a few).
Noteworthy music performances –
Our best acoustic session to date was probably our one year anniversary show which was super fun, Aziz Harun came and performed which was not planned. We’ve had a lot of surprisingly good individuals perform for our open mics, our regular singers have each had their own moments on stage especially Kala and Yaya, Hariz and Method 6. There was one audio-visual piece which was a collaboration between Hariz, Method 6 and Azmina Ahmad which was amazing and was performed on our SHOCKTOBER event last October 2015.