ART JAKARTA 2025 — SPOT

Images courtesy of Art Jakarta

JIExpo Kemayoran, 3 – 5 October 2025

Art Jakarta Spot captivates with its collection of large-scale solo projects, each artistically crafted by galleries. These striking site-specific installations interact dynamically, sparking creative dialogues throughout the Gallery section.

Discover the latest artistic explorations of five Indonesian artists—Ardi Gunawan, Ipeh Nur, Endry Pragusta, Aditya Novali, and Adi Gunawan—each presenting a distinct, large-scale, site-specific solo project curated by their respective galleries within Art Jakarta Spot.

ISA Art Gallery: Ardi Gunawan
Performance schedule: Friday–Sunday, 3–5 October 2025 at 3 PM
This new work presents a restaging of two distinct works: one performance piece, titled Luckily There’s No Inside (2011/2025), and the other, a painting called Friendly Ghost (2024). Luckily There’s No Inside is a soft Dada performance, reimagined through grotesque stand-ins for cultural workers, parodying both cultural memory and the zombification of post-pandemic life. Friendly Ghost, meanwhile, is a painterly intervention into Josias Cornelis Rappard’s 1883 lithograph, where fragments of pop culture and natural history collide with colonial imagery to create a comic-tragic tableau. Together, the performance and the painting chart Gunawan’s ongoing interest in collapse and re-composition: the collapse of time, cultural types, and histories.

luckily there’s no inside (with friendly ghost)
2025
Wood panel, acrylic on canvas, soft sculpture
Variable dimensions

ara contemporary: Ipeh Nur
In The Waves Haven’t Slept, Nur refers to the legend about Nyai Roro Kidul, the Queen of the South Sea in Indonesian folklore. Known as a sacred queen and spirit in Javanese mythology, she was deeply connected to the cultural and spiritual life of Yogyakarta and the Mataram Kingdom. Nyai Roro Kidul was associated with protection and power, as well as spirituality and mystery. She was also known to command storms and tsunamis. Diving into her childhood memories of her grandfather and the South Sea, Nur takes a journey into memories, myths, and history. She creates an imaginary space—like a cave or fortress—that conveys protection, faith, and hope.

The Waves Haven’t Slept
2024
Rock powder, charcoal, indigo paste, turmeric, egg shells on canvas and threads, carpet
single channel video 250 x 400 x 250, video duration 11 minutes 28 seconds

Presented by Le Chateau Living 

Rachel Gallery: Endry Pragusta
These days, many of us have felt an intensifying sense of boredom, discomfort, and estrangement from the world around us. Over time, everyday objects that once seemed ordinary can start to feel strange, stripped of their meaning. The reality we face becomes fragile, as if we’ve been unmoored from a world that once felt familiar. Kelana speaks to that feeling of coming face to face with the absurdity of existence, where no fixed purpose or meaning seems to remain. In this moment of disorientation, we are left with a choice: how to live, how to confront the emptiness, and how to keep moving forward to discover or create our own sense of meaning.

KELANA SERIES
2025
Resin, mix media
Variable dimensions

ROH: Aditya Novali
This work begins with a fragment of an old wooden wardrobe inherited from Aditya Novali’s grandmother, its form multiplied vertically in different materials as a tower of abstracted forms. Passed down to the artist as only a component of a larger module, the original wardrobe’s style is reminiscent of early-nineties Peranakan in Central Java. These absences weave together personal and collective experience: about Novali’s grandmother, the lineage of Chinese Indonesians in Java, and historical events that shaped their lives from 1945 to 1965 to 1998. The wardrobe, as a metaphor, becomes a body that both preserves and conceals generational traces of memory.

Object Permanence (Intro)
2025
Stainless steel mirror, steel, teak wood
540 x 170 x 140 cm

SANHKARA Art: Adi Gunawan
Art history is unsettled—not by destruction, but by reinvention. The Mona Lisa, so long immobile, is carried into a future she was never meant to see. By lifting the Mona Lisa out of her eternal stillness, the story suggests that even art can grow restless, waiting for someone brave enough to carry it elsewhere. To imagine it is to imagine history undone, yet the gesture is not hostile; it is mischievous, bold, and strangely affectionate. In this piece, the world’s most celebrated muse takes on a new role—not as the distant subject of endless admiration, but as the spark of a story that refuses to be predictable.

STOLEN MUSE
2025
124 x 172 x 76 cm
Fibre