Our annual GRAZIA Game Changers initiative celebrates bold ambition and fearless innovation. These are the people reshaping industries, communities, and culture—one daring move at a time.
Ahead, meet Zarina Muhammad. As an artist, researcher and educator, she critically re-examines historical narratives through a contemporary multidisciplinary practice, mapping shared cultural imaginaries across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.
What inspired you to pursue this path? Was there a defining moment that set you on this journey?
My path into art wasn’t shaped by a single defining moment so much as a gradual unfolding of curiosities. I’ve always been drawn to landscapes, stories, and the invisible threads that connect people to places. Over time, I began to understand artistic practice as a way of holding multiple ways of knowing together—oral histories, ecological observation, myth, ritual, and lived experience. Much of my work now unfolds through long-term research across coastal landscapes and port cities, where histories of trade, migration, and ecology intersect.
As an artist, researcher, and educator, I’m interested in how art can create spaces for listening—not just to human narratives, but to the more-than-human worlds that shape how stories are held, remembered, and transmitted across time.
Your work has reshaped the landscape of the arts industry. What motivated you to challenge the status quo?
Much of my work begins with a simple question: whose knowledge counts, and whose voices are missing? Many dominant frameworks, whether historical, ecological or cultural, tend to privilege certain forms of knowledge while sidelining others, especially those that are embodied, ancestral, or rooted in myth and ritual. But for me, these are not peripheral—they’re vital ways of navigating a complex and uncertain world.
Challenging the status quo, for me, means creating space for those ways of knowing to coexist without hierarchy. Many of my projects grow through collaborations with scientists, artisans, storytellers and local knowledge keepers, and sometimes, through participatory processes that invite others to enter the work. These encounters allow artistic practice to become a meeting ground where different knowledge systems can speak to one another.
Much of my work begins with a simple question: whose knowledge counts, and whose voices are missing?
Have you ever faced a moment of self-doubt? How did you push past it?
Self-doubt is part of any creative life, especially when your work doesn’t always follow familiar paths. Much of my work unfolds slowly, through research, fieldwork, and collaboration, and those processes don’t always produce immediate clarity.
What helps me move through those moments is returning to the act of listening. Spending time in landscapes, or in conversation with collaborators, reminds me that artistic work is rarely done alone. It is part of a wider ecology of relationships, and that sense of shared inquiry helps me stay grounded.
What does success mean to you, and has that definition evolved over time?
My relationship to success has never been tied to quantifiable measures or fixed milestones. Having moved through periods of illness at different points in my life, my sense of what matters has shifted quite profoundly. Health, clarity of mind, and the ability to remain present have become central. These experiences have drawn me towards alternative rhythms of living and working—ones guided by attentiveness and intention, and by a careful sense of where energy is given, in ways that feel meaningful, generative, and joyful. They have also taught me the importance of leading with the heart, of making decisions not only through logic or productivity, but through care, intuition, and a deeper sense of connection.
In the context of my art practice, success is when a project opens up new ways of sensing the world, when it invites people to slow down, listen more closely, and recognise that we are part of a much larger ecological and cultural continuum.
What’s an idea you held at the start of your career that you’ve completely rethought?
I think my understanding of artistic practice has gradually expanded. I didn’t begin with a fixed sense of myself as an artist. I was equally drawn to writing, community work, and cultural organising. Over time, I’ve come to understand my practice as something more porous, one that moves across different roles and modes of engagement, as a cultural worker, researcher, and educator.
This has also shaped my resistance to the idea of a singular authorial voice. Much of my work unfolds through collaboration, participation, and teaching, which I see as deeply intertwined with my practice. These spaces of exchange have become just as important as the making itself, and continue to reshape how I think about authorship, knowledge, and how stories are held and shared.
What’s a system, standard, or stereotype you hope to completely rewrite?
One system I would love to see rewritten is the idea that knowledge must be organised into rigid hierarchies. We often separate scientific knowledge, cultural knowledge, and artistic knowledge, as if they belong to entirely different worlds.
Yet many of the questions we face today, especially ecological ones, require us to listen across these different ways of knowing. When scientific research, local knowledge, craft traditions, lived experiences and artistic practice are allowed to speak to one another, they offer more expansive ways of understanding the world and of imagining how we might live within it differently.
What’s next for you? How do you plan to keep changing the game?
I’m currently continuing a long-term body of work that moves across port cities and coastal landscapes in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The project traces entanglements between maritime histories, ecological change, and the cosmologies that shape how communities relate to land and water. Going forward, I’m interested in deepening collaborations across disciplines and communities, and expanding participatory and collective forms of practice. Rather than centering a single authorial voice, I’m drawn to processes that allow multiple voices—human and more-than-human to emerge.
For me, changing the game is about shifting perception, and creating conditions for us to listen differently—across worlds, across ways of knowing, across forms of life—and to recognise that we are already part of a larger web of relations, from which more liveable, more attentive futures can begin to emerge.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photography Joel Low
Creative Direction Kelly Hsu
Styling Marisa Xin
Hair Sveta Klyn/The Suburbs Studio, using Goldwell
Makeup Kat Zhang/ The Suburbs Studio, using Armani Beauty
Producer Cheryl Lai-Lim
Photography assistant Eddie Teo
Fashion assistant Nur Hazwani
