How We Built It: Community in the Arts - Kuala Lumpur Edition

Each speaker will share how their work began, the challenges they have faced, what has not worked, and what it takes to sustain a community over time.

As ArtRabbit deepens its work in KL, this event creates space to listen, learn, and connect with those building the city’s cultural life.

The focus is on how community-led initiatives respond to gaps in access, space, and visibility, and how local practices position themselves within a wider regional and international context. These efforts point to a shared aim: building conditions that allow the Malaysian art scene to sustain itself on its own terms.

ArtRabbit connects a global audience of over 250,000 people with arts and culture across cities including London, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. In Kuala Lumpur, this event focuses on how local initiatives respond to gaps in access, space, and visibility, and how they position themselves within a wider context.

You’ll hear from:  Ahmad Hakym Ahmad Hilmy, KL Sketch Nation (KLSN), Kennedy Michael, The Alliance of River Three! (ART!), Nazura Rahime, Jalan Negara Kita, Rahel Joseph, ILHAM Gallery. With an introduction from Florence Lambert, Head of Arts and Creative Industries at the British Council Malaysia, and Vivi Kallinikou, Managing Director of ArtRabbit.

What to expect

• Short presentations from local community builders
• Honest insights into organising, infrastructure, and sustainability
• Open Q&A and discussion
• Informal networking and drinks

Who this is for

Artists, curators, organisers, producers, cultural workers, and anyone building or contributing to creative communities in KL and beyond.

Tickets are free. Registration required.

About the Hosts & Speakers

Ahmad Hakym Ahmad Hilmy is the founder of KL Sketch Nation (KLSN) and a heritage advocate whose work sits at the intersection of architecture, art, and community. He uses sketching as a practice of “urban narrative,” inviting the public to rediscover and protect historic landmarks such as Stadium Merdeka and the Sultan Abdul Samad Building. 

A strong proponent of adaptive reuse, Hakym champions the revitalisation of abandoned heritage spaces, demonstrating their potential for contemporary community life through creative practice. His work also centres on youth and social empowerment, with initiatives aimed at engaging and uplifting the under-40 generation while promoting ESG values through accessible, community-driven art.

Kennedy Michael is the founder of The Alliance of River Three! (ART!), an initiative that moves in a spectrum between art, ecology, and civic action. The Klang River is where he bases his work, a transformation of an infrastructure into a shared cultural and environmental lifeline. His ongoing rehabilitation project forms part of a 12-year vision aligned with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, seeking to return sections of the river to the public as accessible, lived-in green spaces.

The recognition of his work includes the Exemplar Award (2023) from the Malaysian Institute of Planners, but the work itself is visible in the community . Kennedy aligns education into practice by collaborating with local schools, bringing students into direct engagement with the river through creative, conservation-led activities. What emerges is not just environmental awareness, but redefining  art as both a tool and a language for rethinking how communities inhabit and care for their surroundings.

Nazura Rahime is a placemaker at Jalan Negara Kita, a project grounded in the belief that art should exist within everyday life rather than behind institutional walls. Her practice first drew wide attention during the pandemic, she mobilised artworks onto the streets, literally by transporting them on the back of a lorry and turning entire neighbourhoods into an active spatial element of the exhibition.

That same instinct carries through the ongoing work at Jalan Negara Kita reimagines overlooked urban spaces, particularly back alleys as sites of gathering, exchange, and creative production. Through workshops, markets, and collaborative interventions, these spaces are reshaped into living platforms for community. Alongside this, Nazura’s community engagement extends into larger collectives such as Manggis Group and AP Art Gallery, which function as umbrella platforms for collaboration and exchange.

Rahel Joseph is the Gallery Director of ILHAM Gallery, where her curatorial approach is shaped by rewriting and expanding the contours of Malaysian art history. Her survey exhibitions revisit hidden figures, such as Nirmala Dutt. Rahel works to recover practices that have long sat at the margins, restoring them to critical discourse while embedding them within pedagogical frameworks for younger audiences.

Through her expansive network of regional collaborations with institutions including National Gallery Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, she has positioned Kuala Lumpur as an active node within Southeast Asia’s cultural circuit. This dissolves the geographical boundaries of art while expanding its accessibility.

Driven by widening community access, the triennial ILHAM Art Show’s production grants are directed towards works that are ambitious in scale, conceptual in nature, or materially demanding, projects that often exceed the limits of conventional funding structures. This ethos of access and outreach finds its most direct expression in Skola Gambar ILHAM (2025–2026), a mobile gallery housed within a repurposed shipping container. Conceived to travel across low-cost housing areas, schools, and rural communities, it reorients the gallery outward, bringing contemporary art into closer, more immediate contact with audiences historically underserved by institutional frameworks.