It has been a great honor to write, converse, and think alongside the artmakers of Southeast Asia for the last two years. This TOP TEN list, while shedding light on critical artistic practice and unconventional exhibitions, is nowhere near exhaustive. Wrapping up 2024 and preparing for 2025 with a heart filled with joy and gratitude. […]
Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Asset Object Related to “After Colossus,” 2024, machine-learning-trained generated images and archival images on 35-mm film, acrylic, each 1 7⁄8 × 1 7⁄8″. In Timoteus’s recent exhibition “Fever Dream” at Kohesi Initiatives, Jogja, viewers encountered a cornucopia of objects, from ominous, blurry charcoal drawings of dictators and colonial figures to large-scale installations
View of “Ade Darmawan: Water Resistance,” 2024, Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Photo: Kurniawan Widodo. Tuban (2019–), in the first room, was a mélange of furniture, found paraphernalia, and a distillation apparatus. Electric stoves were placed on wooden dining tables, reclining chairs, and wardrobes, transmitting heat into glass distillers and condensers. Various
As part of the Jakarta Biennale 2021, titled ESOK, I collaborated with curator Grace Samboh to curate an exhibition about crossings: of languages and translation, of migration through plants and via screen, of a perpetually weird state when you are ready to shift and move anytime, yet always eager to dig down for roots. Titled
Pengembara Molek – Cỏ Cắc Cớ – ꦏꦼꦝꦺꦪꦴꦃꦲꦤƖꦩꦸꦮꦒꦸ,: Exhibition Catalog Read More »
Haiza Putti, ‘Salutan Oranye #1,’ 2024, oil and acrylic paint, crayon on canvas, 80 x 100cm (left), and ‘Salutan Oranye #1,’ 2024, oil and acrylic paint, crayon on canvas, 100 x 150cm (right). Image courtesy of M. Revaldi. “Ancestry holds the big answers to our identity. For me, exploring and discovering my family’s history did
Biennials nowadays are about connections—and not only in the opportunistic networking sense. As social debates turn callous and any macro-narrative that does not fit into a cocktail-size conversation becomes disenchanting, we are all secretly yearning for something soft, small, even intimate.
In Lanang Pijar, 2023, a featureless, horned face made of patinated cast brass in a robin’s-egg blue tone looms high above eye level. Suspended beneath it is a droplet-shaped resin womb covered unevenly in goat hide and internally lit. For The Harvest, 2023, a metal hook attached to a buffalo-hide heart supports a tapering cluster of navy-blue, silver-streaked testes, from which delicate metal rods sprout forth like mycelium.
For his solo exhibition “Capturing Silence,” Albert Yonathan Setyawan married spirituality and material imagination, using clay to duplicate the intricate patterns and concentric diagrams of sacred geometries. In Mandala Study #2, 2012, the artist constructed a mandala out of miniature ceramic stupas, covering these forms with white marble sand so that a milky tone emerged within the dimly lit room. Walking around this arrangement, one could discern in it the spiral patterns found in the head of a sunflower, which follow the Fibonacci sequence.
In the installation Subterranean Thunder #1 (all works 2023)—with its lupine figure lying prostrate atop a mound of glass shards, as if collapsed midway through a process of therianthropy—Kuswidananto transformed the gallery’s first room into a site of transcendence.