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.

Free. Capacity is limited, early booking recommended.

Special Mention

A special thank you to Gan Chin Lee for allowing us to share his incredible work. 

Gan Chin Lee is a Malaysian artist whose practice examines the spatial and historical conditions of postcolonial society, with particular attention to the legacy of the Chinese New Villages established during the Malayan Emergency.

Working across painting, drawing, and sculptural installation, his projects are grounded in long-term field research, archival inquiry, and site-based observation. His works reconstruct fragmented landscapes and shared social spaces—such as coffee shops and street environments—as visual systems that register displacement, containment, and the layered negotiations of communal life.

About the Hosts & Speakers

Dr Ahmad Hakym Bin Ahmad Hilmy is a Malaysian architect, artist, and creative economy advocate with a passion for placemaking, heritage, and visual storytelling. A PhD holder in Architecture, his work explores the intersection of sketching, cultural identity, and public engagement. He is the founder of KL Sketchnation, a movement that evolved into Sketchnation Media Group (SMG); a creative agency focused on ESG-driven campaigns and community-based art initiatives.

Through projects like Jalan Negara Kita in Taman Melawati and the KLRiverbanks initiative under River of Life, he transforms urban spaces into cultural landmarks. Blending multidisciplinary arts with advocacy, Hakym continues to champion inclusive, heritage-driven strategies that empower local communities and shape Malaysia’s creative economy.

Kennedy Michael is a sustainability strategist, community organiser, and placemaker with over 30 years of multidisciplinary experience spanning the arts, environmental conservation, and public engagement. He is the founder of Alliance of River Three (ART!) and Community Action Nexus Berhad and a driving force behind grassroots river ecosystem rehabilitation efforts in the Klang Valley.

His work bridges ESG, SDGs, and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), translating policy into community-led action through creative, culture-based approaches.

Kennedy has worked with corporations, government agencies, and civil society, including UNDP Malaysia, while remaining deeply rooted in ground-up initiatives. Known for integrating arts, rhythm, and storytelling into community building, he focuses on empowering people to reclaim and co-create public spaces, particularly through river restoration and placemaking.

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.