Eiffel Chong: Royal Malaysia PoliceArtist Statement: I came across an abandoned police station and f

Eiffel Chong: Royal Malaysia PoliceArtist Statement: I came across an abandoned police station and found identity photographs of the police personnel being scattered around. Most of them still look good, except for a layer of dust on top of the photographs. However, there were some that have been destroyed by the harsh weather in Malaysia. I found them to be interesting. Some look uncanny. It made me wonder why would these photographs being abandoned seeing that they are photographs used for identification.Looking at these photographs, it reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s fiction ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’. The photographs had aged. It serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon its soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement, or through a sign of aging.The Royal Malaysian Police (Polis Diraja Malaysia PDRM) has always been respected as a courageous and civic conscious public service organisation. However, lately the people’s confidence in PDRM has deteriorated. Transparency International (TI) Malaysia placed The Royal Malaysian Police at the top of a list of corrupt organisations ahead of political parties, civil servants, the private business sector and the judiciary. This was unusual compared to surveys done in most other countries, where political parties top the list, followed by the civil service and the judiciary. Police officers were caught on camera beating civilians, manhandling and intimidating them during the Bersih demonstrations that were held in Malaysia in 2011 and 2012.This series of damaged and scarred photographs found in an abandoned police station symbolically represent the decadence of the Royal Malaysian Police. As Walter Benjamin said these photographs show death in them. The sins committed by the Police were in the disfigured photos.via chobimela -- source link

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