I often find myself returning to a personal realisation: harapan, dan hal yang abstrak hampir mungkin tujuannya rimpang—that hope, and abstract things, almost certainly find their purpose in the rhizome; sprawling, interconnected, and subterranean.
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Curated by Krisna Sudharma
Mela(ha)ng nae mang. Before you are old enough to ask the right questions, you learn the cadence of care. My mother would say this whenever things needed to be handled—verbally or physically. It was an instruction to tread carefully, a reminder that the world is fragile and must be navigated with deep intention.
\n‘A mind is a thing that endures.’ When French philosopher Henri Bergson asserted this, he suggested that to endure is not simply to survive; it means that it is our duration—our passage through time—that truly thinks, feels, and sees. The first creation of consciousness is its own speed in time-distance: a causal idea, an idea before the idea.
\nOdd though it may be, the premise of this exhibition begins right here, in the space between a mother’s warning to be careful and a philosopher’s realisation that we are shaped by how we endure time. It begins in a phonetic accident, a slip of the tongue between two languages that reveals the quiet tension of our shared geography.
\nOn one hand, there is the mélange: a mixture, a medley, a distinctively anti-essentialist state where Indonesian and Australian identities blur and entangle. On the other, echoing the local vernacular of my childhood like an odd heckle of linguistics, is the Balinese imperative melahang: a command to handle with extreme care, to fix what is broken, or to split a material carefully along its natural grain.
\nIt is within this friction—between the desire to mix uncontrollably and the deep-seated necessity to be careful—that this exhibition operates.
\nI have always loved words. Yet, the persistent worry in curating and writing is not just losing the words themselves, but losing the feelings or the meanings behind them. When we try to bridge the linguistic gap, different people will inevitably grasp at varying threads. To explain the abstract solely through language risks turning nuance into a rigid statement—a forced conclusion I do not wish to make or condone. If a feeling still hangs in the air, enduring beyond the text, it is working. If not, we must turn to the visual and the audible. This exhibition is an attempt to render those lingering feelings, letting the visual do the heavy lifting where words fall short, so you can feel the translation rather than just read it.
\nBecause the act of looking is hard work. If you don’t truly come by—if you only offer a passing minute or a fleeting second—it is easy to see a lot of art by simply looking and continuing to walk by. But every now and then, something truly pulls you in. Engaging with art is a motion, a physical and emotional investment. Sometimes I stand in these spaces acting as a home and a hope for certain feelings, and for the certain people I encounter. It is about uplifting someone, bringing them to the art, not just pointing at it.
\nDrawing from English born cultural theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, we are here to grapple with the autonomy of the image, to attempt ‘to see how it is itself seen.’ These artworks are not passive objects awaiting our approval or a polite nod of comprehension. They possess their own logic. To understand them is not to grasp them by gesture or strict definition. It is to acknowledge that by the time we feel we have grasped a moment, the circumstances have already shifted, angling toward a place where we have lost sight.
\nMelange is an act of endurance. It asks us to suspend our desire for easy translation and instead engage with the distance between us. To navigate this landscape requires a complex form of entanglement. The artists here are not simply blending cultures; they are engaging in a dual motion of fostering and remembering. There is a commitment to nurture a collaborative space that pushes boundaries, yet this forward momentum is inextricably tied to the tutur; the oral transmission of folkloric narratives.
\nWe see this explicitly in the work of Noviadi Angkasapura. In his work Untitled (2026), the Indonesian words jujur sabar (honesty and patience) stand as legible moral pillars. Yet, surrounding them are inscriptions that defy linguistic translation altogether—energetic vibrations manifesting on linen paper that act as non-verbal, spiritual forces. It is a visual translation of a feeling that transcends the spoken word. Similarly grappling with the frustration of language and imagery is Gian Manik in Marouflage (2020-2021). By stitching together various painter’s drop sheets—some used, some pristine—Manik presents a literal melange. His tumbling figures, animals, and objects represent the sheer difficulty of pulling disparate visual vocabularies together into a cohesive narrative without forcing a rigid conclusion.
\nThis autonomy is deeply embedded in how the artists handle history and tradition—the act of melahang. Nyoman Darmawan, in Benih Kehidupan (2026), manoeuvres at the intersection of preserving the communal artistic traditions of Pengosekan and cultivating his own self-awareness. He does not merely replicate tradition; he refines it, offering a dialogue devoid of the hegemony and divisions that fragment global civilisation. Maharani Mancanagara also interrogates inherited narratives in Allegory of Cornupia #4 and #5 (2026). By replicating select objects from the National Museum of Indonesia using recycled wood, she constructs a cabinet of curiosities that challenges ‘official history’. By juxtaposing everyday objects with Nusantara valuables, she critiques the feudal, nationalist narratives that often marginalise grassroots memory, reminding us that repatriation is not merely about ownership, but the migration of meaning.
\nThis contestation of land, knowledge, and history continues in Mia Boe’s The Preparations (2026). Responding to a poem by Yugembah poet, artist and activist Lionel Fogarty, Boe’s oil paintings trace the tension between the extraction of knowledge from the land by white researchers and the presence of First Nations people existing upon it. The canvas becomes a site of friction between the colonial encyclopedia and Indigenous reality.
\nI often find myself returning to a personal realisation: harapan, dan hal yang abstrak hampir mungkin tujuannya rimpang—that hope, and abstract things, almost certainly find their purpose in the rhizome; sprawling, interconnected, and subterranean. It is with this sprawling, unpredictable energy that the artists resurface those old-world messages from the tutur. By placing them within a modern, speculative landscape, the works act as a bridge. They suggest that identity is not a fixed object to be displayed, but a fragile material that must be melahang; handled properly, sometimes cracked open, to reveal the mixture inside.
\nWe see this adaptation in Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s Within the assembly of the lotus there are no differences (2016). Her glazed ceramic works, based on the Toro (stone lanterns) of Japan, trace how Buddhist vernacular originated in India and mutated as it traveled. The forms are iconic hybrids, a testament to how beliefs adapt and localize in the struggle of the new. Pande Wardina tackles the physical weight of ritual in his concept for 0.3 Arsitektural Tradisi. Questioning the organic waste generated by daily canang sari offerings in Bali amidst a growing population, Wardina constructs a hypothetical utopia—incorporating water cooler systems into traditional architectural structures to extend the life of the offerings. It is a radical melahang; an attempt to deconstruct a tradition to ensure its survival without diminishing its spiritual meaning.
\nThis balance between the spiritual and the physical finds its ultimate metaphor in flight. In the kinetic sculptures of Kadek Armika, such as Implied (2026), traditional Balinese kite-making is fused with architectural aeronautics. Utilising fibre rod and nylon paper, Armika creates forms that engage the wind—a physical embodiment of the spiritual connection between Earth and sky. Flight is not just motion, it is solace.
\nThis is echoed and complicated by Todd McMillan in his tripartite video installation Megorot (2025). Exploring the spiritual resonance of kite flying, McMillan forces a semantic and phonetic collision, imposing the philosophical crises of atheistic Existentialism upon the sacred structure of Balinese ritual. Aligning with French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, the kite becomes a symbol of the tension between comprehension and surrender—slicing through the history of the object to create a ‘bigger loop’ for conversation, a deliberate void space.
\nGalih Adika captures this warped sense of time in Petals on The Elder Matriarch (2025). Painting with oil and lacquer on sculpted aluminum sheet, Adika disrupts the flat canvas to explore ‘Anemoia’—a nostalgia for a time one has never known. The bent metal suggests that memory itself is never linear; it is a shifting terrain where language fails, but the residue of form resonates. Similarly enduring the passage of time is Isadora Vaughan’s Sunrake (2020). Based on rusted agricultural hay rakes found in regional Australia, the cast gypsum and steel structure commands the space like a ritualistic shrine crossed with a sundial. Gathering crust and rust, it stands as an ecological artifact, countering heroic scale with the quiet, inevitable decay of adaptation.
\nThe dialogues in Melange navigate this speed. They suggest that when you are living in uncertainty, you are acting for yourself, navigating your own survival in the void—sometimes through the visceral dry heaving of anxiety, sometimes through the sheer will to endure. Conversely, when you live in pure contentment, you are often merely performing for others. There is always a double-edged dagger here: the safety of conformity versus the terror of the void. We must order and disorder this orientation so as not to become hostages of our own emotions.
\nWhile we are inevitably invested in the outcome, the true value lies in going through the motions of art-making and meaning-making. We do not move forward with the ‘dead weight’ of contentment; we continue because we are led onto a journey of the whimsical, the speculative, and the unknown.
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