Like most good performance artists, Arahmaiani is an expert at making a mess, making noise and making her audience think about their world. But she is hardly the stereotype of Muslim womanhood. Indeed, her art is all about dismantling simplistic images of identity, race and religion.

Arahmaiani's current project at Bangkok's Jim Thompson Centre for the Arts comprises installations, workshops and a performance involving young girls from the nearby Muslim community of Baan Krua, famed for reviving traditional weaving techniques and kick-starting the modern Thai silk industry in the late 1940s.

Lauded the world over, the Indonesian artist receives a steady flow of invitations to international museums and art festivals. But she's no stranger to Baan Krua. As a resident of Bangkok in the 1990s, she was a vocal activist in the community's decade-long protest against a freeway development that would have completely displaced it. In recent years, she has returned many times to develop and plan this project.

"Stitching the Wound" is part of a wider body of work exploring "alternative images of Islam" and Thailand, with its many different Muslim communities, provides an interesting background of racial harmony and discord.

Arahmaiani is concerned by how religious authorities control the interpretation of spiritual teachings. But the interesting struggle is not doctrinal, but cultural - the constant, quiet negotiations that happen as much within faiths and people, as between them. The rise of fundamentalism, in any religion, threatens to reduce this diversity to a monoculture.

"Islam is not only about sharia law," she says.

"Islam is also a rich repository of poetry, music, dance and art: where is this face of Islam?… For me personally, [it] is real and alive, particularly within the Islamic community that I come from in Indonesia."

Arahmaiani has a way with words. Text appears frequently in her work, in various languages, her idiom a deft synthesis of spiritual wisdom, activist bravado and the chance humour of Dadaist poetry.

The installation "Thread, 2006", features 10 large sculptural forms, like giant silk sausages, sewn into the forms of Arabic letters, some hanging, some arrayed on the floor. The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, but Arahmaiani chose 10, a nod to the decimal numeric system, one of Arabic culture's most powerful contributions to scientific thought.

In the non-Muslim world, Arabic script has been made an instrument of fear. In the media's visual arsenal, it often serves as shorthand for Muslim culture's threatening otherness: uncomprehending, we imagine terrorist slogans, calls to wage jihad. Despite the centuries-old riches of Arabic literature, we see a caricature of anti-liberal menace.

Arahmaiani playfully disarms the semiotics of suspicion and fear. Her letters are soft, colourful and inviting, like giant plush toys. Still, some members of the Baan Krua community objected to the script being laid on the gallery floor - Thai is their lingua franca; Arabic is sacred.

A compromise was reached, in the form of a low platform, but the issue highlights the central idea of "Stitching the Wound". The sensitivities aroused between communities are too often reduced to oppositions of race and religion. But the reality is usually a more subtle friction, arising from an interplay of cultural traits that are not universal, but geographically and historically specific. They can be verbal, material, behavioural, or even sartorial.

In the adjacent gallery hangs "Needle, 2006", like the bell of a giant lily, suspended from the ceiling. It is modelled on the more decorative robes worn by some Muslim women for prayer at home. The audience is invited to walk under its dome, pink and orange light glowing through the chequered patchwork of traditional Baan Krua silk.

In the Western media, the veil is often a symbol of stifling religious propriety, or outright patriarchal oppression. Here, it has a more ambivalent sign - it denotes beauty, mental freedom and enlightenment; but also the protective, solitary and meditative space of prayer.

Central to this project were dance and dressmaking workshops with the girls of Baan Krua. These culminated in "Dancing Stitches", a dance programme performed in the gallery to launch the exhibition.

The girls wore bright, patchwork dresses that they designed and made in the workshop, using scraps of silk from the local weaving industry. They choreographed their own routines, and chose the tunes themselves, preferring contemporary pop songs to the more traditional genres proposed by the artist. They did, however, present one traditional song, written in Malay, before joining the artist for the finale, a performance to Indonesian Dangdut music, a popular form blending Javanese sounds with Malay, Arabic and Indian influences.

She may be a world-famous performer, but Arahmaiani is no prima donna. Stepping rhythmically among the girls, in her own chequered costume, she is more like a Pied Piper.

Yet she stresses the importance of giving the girls creative autonomy, and the confidence to express their own, mixed cultural influences.

There is a stark contrast between the fast, hollow disco music and the patient lilt of the traditional songs; and between the austere, grey walls of the gallery and the fabulous, motley array of dancing shoes and dresses. These incongruities lie at the heart of "Stitching the Wound", eclipsing the typical images of Muslim femininity.

Religion is not just a spiritual exercise. It shapes, and is constantly shaped by, the daily rhythms of specific times and places. With a little practice, all these rhythms can be recognised, and understood, by anyone.

David Teh is a freelance writer and curator, based in Bangkok.

"Stitching the Wound" was performed yesterday. The installation remains on show at the Jim Thompson House on Soi Kasemsan 2, opposite the National Stadium on Rama I Road, Bangkok until September 30.  It's open daily from 9am to 5pm. For more information, call

(02) 216 7368.

David Teh

Special to The Nation