School of Creative
Industries
Khairul Jafni
Khairul Jafni is an academically trained visual artist. He further pursued his studies in the BA (Hons) Arts Management programme at LASALLE College of the Arts where he founded 'After Zine' – a platform for visual artists to showcase their works-in-progress. As founder, Jafni saw the significance for documentation and the need to engage the audience through the creative process. The zine was exhibited at The Substation as part of the Proposals for Novel Ways of Being initiative organised by National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum and he is currently working towards its next issue. His experiences in arts management also led him to develop a keen interest in cultural heritage and its conservational practices. Marrying both interests, Jafni’s undergraduate thesis seeks to explore the way Singapore’s cultural heritage is interpreted online through a visual rhetoric analysis.
Thesis abstract
"Mosque and murals": the promotion of Kampung Gelam
The research seeks to investigate the myriad of meanings, aspirations and power that an image possesses especially in the promotion of heritage. Particularly, it focuses on the promotion of Kampong Glam online. Through extraction of fundamental concepts from various literature on visual rhetoric, the study proposes a visual rhetoric analysis framework that is used in analysing the current interpretation and promotion of Kampong Glam. The findings from the framework has led to the exploration of different themes such as the colonial narrative, historical disconnect, excluded stakeholders and creation of symbols. "