Noor Iskandar is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and lecturer based in Singapore. His practice delves into Islamic aesthetics and spirituality, whilst evolving around visual culture, heritage studies as well as practice-led research. He earned his Master in Arts (Research) at Nanyang Technological University School of Art, Design and Media after having graduated from the same alma mater with an Honours in Fine Arts majoring in Photography and Digital Imaging. His works have been exhibited and published both in Singapore as well as internationally including London, Valencia, Shah Alam, Pingyao, Belfast and Bandung.
During his junior year of graduate candidature in 2015, Noor went on to co-curate Bayu: An Exhibition of Contemporary Islamic Art as part of the Conference of Islamic Art, Design and Architecture (CIADA) in NTU ADM. The following year, Noor was awarded the esteemed Goh Chok Tong Mendaki Youth Promise Award accolade by jury for his contributions towards the arts in Singapore within the Malay/Muslim community. Noor also dabbles in poetry writing independently, as well as public workshops and presentations of his practice for diverse communities. In 2018 and 2020, he self-published his poetry collections For(god) and I Love Too Quietly respectively.
Noor's research and artistic practice are often a/r/t/ographic by nature, grounded in Image culture and themes of losing, death and forgetting. He sees situations, micro-moments, interventions as divine disruptions. He charts these scatterings into alternative constellations of probing lived experiences, feelings and all that is liminal. He indulges in the poetics of archives, gestures, images, pilgrimages, text(tiles), dreams fragments, melancholia, sentience and the spirit of the spatial in his practice.
All in all, Noor aims for his philosophy and pedagogy to be akin to a flaneur-cartographer; contextually nomadic, liberatory and collaborative, enabling migrations from periphery to center; teasing out conversations left at the margins such as Faith and Art. He aims to expand sites of tenderness, coexistence and deep meanings through his art. Presently, Noor situates all these strands of inquiry within a personal project entitled A New Sacred.