A CROCODILE, EATING

A CROCODILE, EATING

(Photo by Shuyi)

A CROCODILE, EATING is an installation work, ritual performance, and shrine.

It is part of WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, a contemporary visual art exhibition about tabletop roleplaying games, running at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK from now until 10 May 2025.

If you ask me to build a world, I will build a crocodile.

On linoleum flooring, stones are arranged into the shape of a saltwater crocodile. Embedded in the stones, on the crocodile’s back, are bowls, jars and platters of all kinds.

At the snout of the crocodile, on a rickety stool. At regular intervals, this printer noisily begins to print on coloured paper—stories about generational pain, family trauma, personal curses.

A printed notice reads:

The crocodile is kind. They love us. They eat our pain. Help them eat. 1. Take a sheet, read its prayer aloud. Help the crocodile understand. 2. Tear up the sheet. Help the crocodile chew; they have no more teeth. 3. Place the shreds of your sheet in a jar. Help the crocodile swallow. 4. If the jars overflow, wedge your shreds between the stones. The crocodile must swallow. 5. Thank the crocodile aloud. They are too full to reply. The crocodile is kind. They love us. We have so much pain. They must eat.

This crocodile has many origin stories:

+

1. Lorn Song Of The Bachelor.

Specifically its cover. A loving and reverent tableau by Nadhir Nor, who presents the titular crocodile of the adventure as a sumptuous feast---each organ served on its own platter; spiced, wreathed in perfume; the meat arranged as both lingam and yoni, filled with flowers and water.

+

2. Modern magic.

(Excerpts from my proposal doc for A CROCODILE, EATING)

Southeast Asian magical practice, when depicted in anthropological or art contexts, is often rendered in a particular aesthetic language, designed to read as authentic:

Black-and-white photographs. A woman in traditional clothes. Verdigrised bowls and platters and incense holders. Fresh-cut flowers. Muted, archaic, like a temple complex unearthed by archaeologists.

But magic as it is practiced today isn't like that. Curses are between feuding neighbours, in low-cost housing. They are cast in a flat, by a gig worker, with victims' faces printed by an inkjet printer with clogged nozzles.

Temples are painted in bright pink, lined with linoleum, beautified with artificial flowers, lit with white fluorescent tubes---affordable, long-lasting, bright.

Which bits of a ritual are essential, and which bits can you abridge? Can you cast a blessing over WhatsApp?

True magic and belief care more about being practical, than reading as authentic.

+

3. The tomb at Pengkalan Kempas.

(Image source)

The tomb of Syeikh Ahmad Majnun, a 15th-Century saint, was used to swear oaths. At the foot of the tomb is a pillar, with a hole. You would place your hand in this hole, and speak your oath. If you spoke lies, the hole would close on your hand and crush it.

As shipping a whole oathstone to Nottingham wasn't practical, A CROCODILE, EATING is built from Cornish pebbles, bought from a garden-supply store.

Whatever works, you know? Again: magic is practical.

+

4. Hang Tuah's footprint.

This shrine marked the spot where the Malay demigod Hang Tuah once stepped, thereby indenting the rock with his footprint.

It was used by locals: to ask for children, to ask for love, to ask for fortune. People would leave live chickens as offerings. (Nearby villagers would take these chickens home, to eat.)

Religious authorities destroyed the shrine some time in early 2023, on the basis that it promoted idolatry.

When I build a shrine I am always rebuilding the Hang Tuah shrine.

+

5. Shrines as art.

(Image source)

Both Sharon and I have been thinking about shrines, lately.

We have come to see them as an artistic and political counterargument to national institutions, official religions, corporate IPs, platform monopolies---the exclusive franchises of power, money, and the state.

Despite nationalism’s efforts to centralise and clone a national identity, still we mutate, still we bootleg, still we graffiti, becoming once again ourselves. And—particular to post-colonial societies—in doing so we casually continue the work of liberation, sneaking the idea of freedom away from our own architects and elites and prime ministers, who would seek to seize its meaning for their own purposes. The churches or mosques or temples to demos that the federal government builds are ours to transform. To take from. To ignore. “No need. We’ve got our own shrines at home.”

Along with David Blandy, we made ShrineShare, an exhibition-in-a-folder of personal shrines by sixteen artists from around the world.

A CROCODILE, EATING is me sharing mine.

+

6. Games as shrines.

(My home group, with custom T-shirts our GM Amanda made. Mine says: "Impostor Syndrome? Not In This Economy")

Tabletop roleplaying games resist dogma. As much you might like to appeal to RAW or Jeremy Crawford, play always and inevitably mutates to fit the mood and metre of your own table.

The rules system you use might furnish a set of cultural mores, an architectural vernacular---

But it is you and your players who actually make the game: your habits, your house-rules; your preferred procedures of handling particular situations; your in-jokes and callbacks and thematic fixations.

In play, a TTRPG is a shrine dedicated to your home game, a set of unique rites---always unique, always local, always small-scale.

+

7. TTRPGs in galleries.

(Works by Scrap World, Amanda Lee Franck, Chris Bisette, Laurie O'Connel, David Blandy)

How do you present a roleplaying game in an art gallery?

I am no visual artist. I have no paintings or sculptures I can present, to transport visitors into a different world.

As a writer I mainly think in texts, narratives. I could have presented something narrative for WEIRD HOPE ENGINES: invited audiences to sit and play through an adventure; given them rules and characters and a scenario to play through.

Would've been unsatisfactory, though. While imaginative and experiential, such a work would not really have been visual. And TTRPGs take time---"sit down, participate for half-an-hour" time---which is a lot to ask, even of the most eager gallery visitor.

"Games as shrines" gave me a solution.

I'd make a shrine in the gallery. You'd play the shrine by performing some simple ritual actions. The shrine is tangible, made of stone and accompanied by a diffuser putting benzoin oil into the air. Its associated meanings and practices evoke a world, a cosmology.

You pray to the crocodile. The prayers are real and in earnest. You feed the crocodile. The crocodile changes with every prayer; as the exhibition continues the crocodile grows and is furred in colour.

+

8. Pain.

None of the prayers you offer to A CROCODILE, EATING are fictional. All of them---stories of family loss; fraught relationships with parents, with homes; abuse, cultural misogyny, ethnic tension, toxic masculinity---are true.

Some of them come from my own life. At least half come from my friends, who shared with me their stories via THE CAT IS KIND, a prototype shrine I made a week before leaving for Nottingham.

You would ritually offer "a story that aches" to this cat-shaped piggy-bank, and the cat would eat that ache for you.

+

9. Port Dickson.

Everything I make is ultimately about Port Dickson, the small Malaysian town in which I live.

Port Dickson is defined by its relationships to places across the sea. It is a town of petrochemical industry; exporting diesel and jet fuel abroad.

In return, from the First World, we received unwanted textiles by the container-load, in huge bundles---there are many "bundle" shops in my town, thrift stores essentially, where locals sort through the piles of discarded factory uniforms and fast fashion for still-usable garments to sell second-hand.

(Fun fact: all of the coats I wore in the UK I bought from the bundle!)

We fuel your civilisation, process your trash.

For A CROCODILE, EATING to embody my context it has to communicate the flavour of this relationship:

The shrine's rites do not allow gallery visitors to say their own prayers. You are only ever feeding the crocodile burdens imported from somewhere else.

The sense of an exhausted land, continually asked to take on more weight from without---growing more exhausted and strange, changing.

+

10. Sincerity.

For this shrine to work it had to be real.

I took my shoes off whenever I stepped onto the linoleum. I prayed as I built the crocodile, stone by stone. Every time I entered and left the gallery space I faced my small, tired crocodile god, and I bowed to them, and believed.

I hope my belief makes the shrine real, and you feel this, if and when you visit, yourself.

+++

WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, curated by Dying Earth Catalogue (who are David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards, and Jamie Sutcliffe), featuring works by:

Angela Washko

Andrew Walter

Amanda Lee Franck

Chris Bisette

Laurie O'Connel

Scrap World

Shuyi Zhang

Tom K Kemp + Patrick Stuart

Zedeck Siew

Adam Sinclair + Lotti Closs

At Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, until 10 May 2025.