Galeri Sasha is pleased to present $omeone, $omething, $omewhere, a solo exhibition by Zulkefli Jais (b. 1996, Perak, Malaysia). This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition, bringing together new mixed-media collages on plywood and an installation that probes into the realities of migration, displacement, and ownership.
The collages are constructed from a decade’s worth of cut-out images sourced from Newsweek magazine. Zulkefli builds his compositions by collecting, categorizing, and sketching scenes before merging them with fragments of media—an act of reordering narratives and reassigning meaning. Crowds of faceless figures populate the works: bodies gathered under pressure, caught between obedience and resistance. Here, ownership is not simply about land or territory, but about the claim to identity, autonomy, and survival in the face of systems that seek to regulate them.
Over the past five years, while working odd jobs in factories and construction sites, Zulkefli came into close contact with migrant workers—many undocumented—who shared stories of forced migration, separation from family, and life under constant threat of removal. These encounters shape the collages’ atmosphere of fracture and anonymity, where figures are stripped of individuality and reduced to patterns of labour, control, and invisibility.
At the center of the exhibition is Watchtower (2025), an installation of convex mirrors, galvanized steel, fencing, barbed wire, and collage. Referencing Michel Foucault’s reading of the panopticon, the work stages the psychological condition of surveillance: the knowledge of possibly being watched, and the resulting self-regulation of behaviour. As the viewer sees their own reflection caught behind barriers, they are implicated in the same dynamics of observation and control that define border regimes today.
Together, the works in $omeone, $omething, $omewhere sharpen the question of what it means to belong. Zulkefli shows how displacement unsettles the very categories of victim and oppressor, and how ownership—of land, labour, and even one’s own image—becomes a site of ongoing struggle.
Zulkefli Jais, also known as “Kecik”, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, performance, sculpture, and collage. His work examines the social and psychological structures that frame contemporary life, often foregrounding themes of displacement, anonymity, and collective memory. He is the recipient of the Young Contemporary Major Award (Bakat Muda Sezaman, 2023) and represented Malaysia at the Gwangju Biennale 2024. His work has been shown at the National Art Gallery of Malaysia and across the region. $omeone, $omething, $omewhere is his debut solo exhibition.
