As a repository for memory and a site for creation, the built environment plays a central role in the work of Harold Reagan Eswar, better known as Egn. The artist works in the East Malaysian city of Kota Kinabalu’s town planning office and was an early member of the influential street art collective Cracko Art Group (CAG) who produced satirical, cartoonish canvases and murals, organised exhibitions and explored different tactics for community participation.

Distributed electronically and as sprawling posters, Egn’s ‘spatial biographies’ unite the various aspects of his practice, using his architectural training to draw on the deep well of memory that accumulates around specific structures, spaces and geographies. These include intensely personal recollections of the artist’s childhood homes, as well as collaborations with communities in Kota Kinabalu and the regional centre of Keningua. As with Egn’s own bittersweet reminiscences, in the collaborations nostalgia sits alongside moments of real darkness – including violence, abuse and mental health struggles – while seemingly innocuous events provide an insight into complex ethnographies.

Expressed through illuminating quotes, recollections, maps and image archives, Egn’s collaborative process creates memory banks of individual experiences and collective histories in East Malaysia’s urban centres.