About the exhibition
Welcome April, the beginning of spring and the blossoming of young things. We are delighted to invite you to the opening of our next show, an exhibition of new photography from a group of emerging, Malaysian contemporary photographers.
With motifs of fleeting youth, the precarity of time, and the abundantly incidental beauty of nature, the photographs in April express a mood of calm, quiet contemplation. All three photographers are established in their respective image-making fields which run parallel to the art world. The work of a professional photographer is busy and there is rarely time to contemplate one’s photos on a human scale, i.e. in a size larger than a phone screen. April presents photography in real life, as something to gaze at rather than scroll past, something you can own rather than merely Like, something that can accompany you through life rather than be drowned among the flood of images that we consume daily.
Our three featured photographers are Alvin Lau, known for his photographs of urban terrains and textures, who has shifted his lens away from concrete and manmade structures to contemplate the precarious fragments of the natural world that bloom secretly within urban surroundings. Amani Azlin is an editorial and fashion photographer who is sharing with us a selection of diaristic photos of her observations while on location and in between scheduled shoots, betraying a more intimate and personal gaze which is at once the core and the reverse of her studied editorial style. Conversely, Nadirah Zakariya, known for her personal meditations on womanhood through self-portraiture and floral still lives, has shifted her lens outward to present tender portraits and landscapes captured during her residency at an artist commune near Mt Fuji, Japan, in 2025.
Exhibition dates:
11 April – 3 May 2026
Opening reception:
Saturday, April 11 from 3pm – 7pm
Enquiries:
hello@thebackroomkl.com
Exhibition Text
by Ellen Lee
“Pictures came and broke your heart…”
—The Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star
Welcome April, a month in spring that harkens the blossoming of young things. Though we don’t experience “spring” as such in Malaysia, the month and its ebullient name (which seems to capture the youthful promise of spring closer than its predecessor, “March”), along with how it begins on the first with laughter, was chosen because it reflected the spirit of the exhibition, which presents three emerging photographers to an art audience that rarely gets to see contemporary photography being exhibited. For a medium that continues to struggle for recognition as “serious” art, why not abandon that striving altogether and embrace its romance instead? Photographs possess a power like that of the spring, an ability to stir emotions and wake up the soul with their promise of open-ended possibilities.
Spring—and its associations with youth and childhood—finds expression in the choice of Amani Azlin’s photograph of a kid goat by the sea for the exhibition poster. The rest of Amani’s photographs are slices from a stylised photo diary, capturing places she’s been on her travels or while on location. Yet they are often unmoored from context, unfolding instead within a kind of visual void, like illustrations accompanying a fairytale. A baby goat by the sea, playing among the wildflowers; a large bundle of leaves caught blurrily travelling along a country road like a benign monster. Her full-time work of being a fashion and editorial photographer is often that of transforming ordinary things and people into fairytale images, pictures that are meant to inspire desire, whether in the form of a desire to possess the subjects of the photos, or to look like them, or to simply live alongside them within the perfectly crafted, stylised fairytale world of the photograph, fixed in beauty. The same sentiment is brought over to her candid photos; the image-makers can’t stop fabricating a different, more beautiful world on top of the real one.
Nadirah’s photographs likewise project a sense of untouched, almost incorruptible purity, set against the serene presence of Mount Fuji. Produced during her residency at an artist commune near the mountain in January 2025, these images function as postcards from a time spent among strangers who eventually became friends. Together, these fellow artists ushered in the new year, sharing in that delicate and delicious threshold of time when everything still feels ripe for the taking. The photos linger on the people she met, often captured shyly and slyly, from behind her subjects or while their eyes were closed. They are supplemented by photographs of empty rooms (kitchen, lounges, bathrooms) captured in an early morning light, before everyone else has woken up, or during the fading light of dusk, after they’ve all scattered. Viewers are left to piece together their own narrative, to imagine what life was like in the commune beyond the camera. The power of the photos lie in this gap between the subjects and the viewer, the way one can feel the traces of people, and imagine echoes of their laughter or the residual heat of their recently vacated seats…
The fairytale of Alvin’s photographs takes the form of a secret garden, echoing the title of one of his works. Within this secret world that only he knows, blades of grass and wiry strands of branches pulse with life and the alien message of their vegetal existence. The photographer discovers these secret gardens through hours of journeying by train, bicycle, and walking. The physical exertion of the journeying is belied by the vulnerability of the objects photographed—sharp and careful images of a fern, or a branch—or perhaps the latter is the result of the former, perhaps it’s the hourslong active search for the photograph that induces states of heightened perception and keenness of feeling to capture the moments when they present themselves. The images thus condense a philosophy of living—a union of body and vision, where what is worth capturing is inseparable from the act of seeking.
In closing, like spring itself, the photographs are a young promise: they open fantasy portals for the viewer to step into and spin their own stories from, they capture fleeting feelings and moments, objects fixed in time that may not appear the same in the next cycle of the seasons. Photography, here, becomes a medium for dreaming.
About the artists
Alvin Lau (b. 1994) is a full-time photographer and artist based in Kuala Lumpur. His works are centred around a constant exploration and investigation into life and death, often using his images as a way of condensing or documenting larger ideas and narratives. His work has been exhibited around the world, notably in the Jeonju International Photo Festival, Landskrona Photo Festival, Sentul Biennale: To Our Friends (2025, A+ Works of Art, KL), Swallow & Spit (2023, A+ Works of Art, KL), holes (2023, The Back Room, KL), and we will have been young (2018, ILHAM Gallery, KL). In 2024, he organised his own debut solo exhibition, titled I Want to Go Home, which took place at 293, an artist-run space in Kuala Lumpur. Aside from exhibitions, he was a participant in the SUNYI Artist Residency by the National Gallery of Art (Langkawi), Malaysia, in 2024 and represented Malaysia in the Southeast Asian Masterclass supported by Goethe-Institut Malaysia, Ostkreuz Photographers’ Agency, Berlin and OBSCURA Festival in 2017.
Amani Azlin (b. 1994) is a photographer and director based in Kuala Lumpur. She received her BA in Graphic Media Design from the University of the Arts, London, but pivoted to professional photography soon after graduating, thus embracing her teenage passion. In her commercial work, she has done fashion and editorial shoots for ANAABU, Nelissa Hilman, the United Nations, Grazia, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. In her capacity as a photography artist, she has shown work in group exhibitions around Kuala Lumpur. Notable recent exhibitions include the recollection project: an exercise in learning (2024, HARTA), Realpolitik (2023, CULT Gallery), and Angkat Berat (2021, Tun Perak Co-op). Her work is in the collection of and on display at Momo’s and The Chow Kit hotels in Kuala Lumpur.
Nadirah Zakariya (b. 1984) is a Malaysian photography artist whose work explores themes of place, memory, and intimacy. She graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, in 2010 and is currently based in Kuala Lumpur. She has had solo and group exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, New York, London, and Japan; exhibitions of note include FLOWERS: Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture (2025, Saatchi Gallery, London) and Times to Come (2024, DECK, Singapore). Her most ambitious solo show to date was Feeling Feelings Makes Me, Me (2023, temu house, KL), which featured nearly 40 works and offered an expansive reflection on her artistic journey. This exhibition was followed by the multimedia installation Air Mata Air in 2025, which was shown first at The Back Room, KL, before travelling to the Indonesia Contemporary Art & Design (ICAD) 15: Earth Society in Jakarta. That same year, she was an artist-in-residence at the 6okken Artist Residency near Mt. Fuji, Japan. Outside of her artistic practice, Nadirah is an in-demand commercial photographer, producer, and director, the co-founder of Layar Lucida creative studio, and the co-founder of the Exposure+ Photo Festival.
Installation
