Curatorial Projects
Sentimental Value
In its 12th edition, Asia NOW explores the concept of ‘Sentimental Value’, examining how artworks, objects and materials acquire value through the lives they touch.
A gesture is passed on. A material retains traces of its use. An object that is carried elsewhere becomes a repository of family history, a place or an absence. This reveals an ecology of attachment, shaping another economy of value through memory, labour, care and relationships. ‘Sentimental value’ encapsulates this network of connections: the bonds that link forms to individuals, environments, and the histories from which they originate.
This reflection considers soil as a material, a territory and an archive. As a site of cultivation and extraction, sustenance and dispossession, the soil bears the marks of what has been planted, taken or displaced. Moving from soil to surface, skin and second skin, the works explore the migration of people alongside the circulation of resources and knowledge, colonial legacies, and opportunities for regeneration. The intimate provides an entry point to collective narratives.
This inquiry extends to participatory practices, gestures of hospitality, and rituals of gathering across Asia and throughout the Asia NOW programme. These are encounters in which value also emerges through what is experienced, cultivated, and shared.
Vessels of Memory
Artists from Biennale Jogja in dialogue with European contexts
Curated by Alia Swastika
A vessel holds. It carries water, soil, thread, archives, and stories across generations. It cracks, it is mended, it is remade. Vessels of Memory brings together 10 artists from Biennale Jogja to present contemporary Indonesian practices in Europe. The exhibition proposes memory not as something stored in the past, but as a practice we do in the present — through our hands, our communities, and the materials we live with.
Across Java, Sumatra, Bali, Papua, Sulawesi, and diasporic routes, these artists work with painting, weaving, soil, performance, and archival research. They trace how knowledge moves: through myth, through craft, through ecology, and through displacement. In doing so, they ask what we choose to inherit, what we choose to repair, and what new forms memory can take under pressure.
Artists:
Citra Sasmita, Ines Katamso, Hashel El Lamki, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Jumaadi, Nathalie Mochamad, Dicky Takndare, Natasha Tontey, Amalia Laurent, Rani Jambak.
Coming Soon
