Художница Яти Каправи представила серию работ о женской независимости на фестивале в Куала-Лумпуре

Better known as Yati Kaprawi, the 60-year-old artist and women’s rights activist explored those ideas through 15 works recently exhibited at the Puan-Tastic Festival at GMBB in Bukit Bintang. Her interpretation of Merdeka moves between two ideas: the freedom of a country and the personal freedoms that shape everyday life, particularly for women. “For women, we usually carry a double burden, working not only in the office but also at home,” she told Bernama. “Women need time for themselves and should feel safe in public spaces without fear of being harassed or disturbed. To me, that is a form of personal freedom that is immensely valuable.” Born in Batu Pahat, Johor, Yati works across several creative forms, including documentary filmmaking and animation, but chose printmaking for this particular body of work. Around half of the pieces feature notable Malaysian women, drawing on research by academic, social anthropologist and women’s rights activist Rusaslina Idrus. Rusaslina was among the co-founders of “Sejarah Wanita”, a digital project established in 2012 to document and preserve the stories of women whose contributions have often received less attention in mainstream accounts of Malaysian history. For Yati, translating those complex lives into a single image was one of the biggest challenges – “not simply in creating the images, but selecting a moment or element that could represent the life journey of a particular figure, as their histories are so rich”, she explained. “At the same time, I had to ensure that the visuals could convey their stories while capturing people’s attention.” Yati deliberately chose block printing partly because she wanted to see more women artists remain active in the medium. Its hands-on nature also suited an exhibition concerned with history, memory and the traces people leave behind. Merdeka from another angle Yati believes art can make history feel less distant, particularly for younger people who may know important figures largely through textbooks or brief references online. She hopes exhibitions such as this encourage visitors to look more closely at the people behind Malaysia’s history and recognise that independence was shaped by many different forms of contribution and sacrifice. That includes women whose stories, she believes, deserve greater visibility in conversations about the country’s development and social history. For Yati, engaging with history also means learning to question what we encounter in the present. With information spreading rapidly online, she believes people need to examine different perspectives rather than accepting inflammatory or misleading content at face value. Her artworks at the recent two-day festival were priced from RM1,000, with proceeds channelled to the SIS Forum (Malaysia) fund. Still, the ideas behind them extend beyond the exhibition itself. By approaching Merdeka through women’s lives, personal autonomy and the simple act of carving an image by hand, Yati offers another way of thinking about independence – not only as something achieved in 1957, but as something people continue to define in their own lives.