World Word: Imagining the Lost, Narrating the Silent

In his first solo exhibition in Indonesia, S. Urubingwaru asks: How does one's personal experience evolve into a private mythology? His love of storytelling begins with the tales his father told him at night and deepens through wayang kulit, whose deliberately deformed animal figures opened onto other ways of seeing. Drawn to "silent histories," accounts erased or suppressed under political pressure, religion, or the precarity of survival, he carries his grief over fading local traditions and the deliberate eradication of historical events into paintings of solitary, contemplative figures set against figures of myth, embodiments of the Other (Sang Liyan), reopening a space for forgotten voices. Fiction here is not an escape from the real but a way to approach it indirectly: memory is curated, events are reread, and emotion takes new form. Once this personal mythology enters the public realm, it begins to exceed its maker, finding common ground amongst differences. This exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Bambang 'Toko' Witjaksono.