ISA March Newsletter 2026

 

ISA Art Gallery at Art Central Hong Kong

24– 29 March 2026

Central Harbourfront Hong Kong

 

ISA Art Gallery is pleased to announce that we have been selected as the Feature Gallery for Art Central Hong Kong. This recognition marks an important milestone for the gallery as we bring a focused presentation of three leading artists whose practices resonate across Southeast Asia and the broader international context: Arahmaiani, Jumaadi, and Sinta Tantra.

 

Our presentation brings together distinct yet interconnected practices. Arahmaiani’s longstanding engagement with spirituality, ecology, and socio-political critique will be shown alongside Jumaadi’s lyrical, narrative works rooted in Javanese cosmology and diasporic experience. In conversation with these practices, Sinta Tantra’s materiality and geometric compositions rooted in her identity as a Balinese, extends painting into spatial and public realms. Together, the presentation reflects ISA Art Gallery’s commitment to artists who navigate tradition and contemporaneity, locality and global exchange.

 

Held annually in Hong Kong, Art Central has established itself as a key platform within Asia’s art ecosystem, spotlighting both established and emerging voices while fostering cross-regional dialogue. Positioned alongside the city’s major art week programming, the fair is recognized for its curated sectors, ambitious installations, and dynamic engagement with collectors, institutions, and curators from across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

 

24 March 2026 | VIP Preview, 2 – 8 PM

 

Wednesday, 25 March | 12 – 5 PM

Thursday, 26 March | 12 – 7 PM

Friday, 27 March | 12 – 7 PM

Saturday, 28 March | 11 AM – 7 PM

Sunday, 29 March | 11 AM – 5 PM

 

Central Harbourfront Hong Kong

9 Lung Wo Road, Hong Kong 

 As Biophilia: Exquisite Corpse enters its second month at ISA Art Gallery, the exhibition deepens its commitment to environmental resistance by foregrounding three artists whose practices have significantly shaped the discourse of ecology in Indonesian contemporary art, each through distinct yet interconnected trajectories of activism, spirituality, and material transformation.

 

Arahmaiani stands as one of the most influential figures in Southeast Asian performance and socially engaged art. For over three decades, she has persistently bridged spirituality, feminism, political critique, and environmental consciousness, positioning Indonesian intellectual and cosmological frameworks within global conversations. Her recent presentation at Tate Modern in 2024 and her participation in the Venice Biennale affirm her sustained international relevance and institutional recognition. In the I Love You series presented in this exhibition, Arahmaiani reactivates Jawi script—historically a connective linguistic system across the archipelago—as a living symbol of pluralism and syncretic coexistence. Inscribed onto repurposed oil barrel lids, industrial remnants tied to extractive economies, her words transform surfaces marked by ecological exploitation into sites of affirmation and ethical reflection. Through this deliberate convergence of language, material reuse, and spiritual symbolism, she insists that cultural pluralism and ecological accountability are inseparable imperatives for collective survival.

 

Working from the ground up, Fitri DK embodies the intersection of art and grassroots resistance. As an active member of Taring Padi and SURVIVE! Garage Collective, she has long been embedded in community-based movements that use visual culture as a tool for solidarity and protest. Her recent exhibitions at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society and CBK Zuidoost, Netherlands (2025), mark the expanding international recognition of her activist practice. Drawing from the Kendeng farmers’ movement and the cosmology of Nyawiji Ibu Bumi, a philosophy emphasizing unity with Mother Earth, Fitri transforms batik, banners, and tents of struggle into embodied acts of devotion and accountability. Works such as Tenda Perjuangan (2021) do not merely document resistance; they operate as living extensions of it, collapsing the boundaries between ritual, protest, and artistic. In doing so, she redefines authorship as collective and positions art as a sustained social commitment rather than symbolic gesture.

 

For more than four decades, Teguh Ostenrik has remained a pivotal force in Indonesian contemporary art, continuously expanding the role of sculpture beyond static form. As the founder of Yayasan Terumbu Rupa, he has dedicated his practice to the revitalization of coral reef ecosystems. His long-term project Domus Anguillae (House of Eels), located off the coast of Tejakula, Bali, merges sculptural structures with marine regeneration, creating habitats that actively support underwater life. This ongoing intervention reconfigures artistic authorship as ecological collaboration—where the sea, coral, and marine species become co-creators. International presentations, including a solo exhibition in Germany (2018) and participation in the 16th Plataran Cultural Heritage Journey in Jakarta (2025), further underscore his influence and the global resonance of his environmental methodology. Teguh’spractice demonstrates that art can function not only as commentary on ecological crisis, but as direct, measurable engagement in environmental repair.

 

Biophilia is a biannual exhibition series by ISA Art Gallery, dedicated to supporting environmental resistance. This year’s edition, Exquisite Corpse, brings together nine artists, Arahmaiani, Dabi Arnasa, Anang Saptoto, Cynthia Delaney Suwito, Fitri DK, Kynan Tegar × Studio Birthplace × Novo Amor, Mater Design Lab, Reza Kutjh, and Teguh Ostenrik in a tentacular reflection on ecological interdependence.

 

Taking its point of departure from a collaborative game of chance that emerged during the Surrealist era, Exquisite Corpse unfolds unpredictably. This process of merging multiple partial knowledges forms a cognition akin to a hive mind, a consciousness that positions itself as urgency that must be addressed collectively. At its core, Biophilia: Exquisite Corpse offers inquiries on bodies and systems that govern the ecosystem we inhabit. How do we walk the earth so irreversibly shaped by violence?

 

 

26 January – 3 April 2026

World Trade Centre 3, Jakarta

 

Opening in the early days of 2026, Sebuah Jeda Peneduh – A Moment’s Pause offers a reflective tribute to the late master painter A.D. Pirous. Presented at World Trade Centre Jakarta in collaboration with Jakarta Land, ISA Art and Design, and Serambi Pirous, the exhibition positions itself as a deliberate counterpoint to the relentless pace of contemporary life shaped by commerce, politics, and bureaucratic urgency.

 

Through Pirous’s signature abstract-narrative approach, the exhibition foregrounds art as an act of storytelling rather than spectacle. While deeply informed by Islamic spirituality, Pirous’s works speak in a universal visual language, inviting audiences of all backgrounds to pause, reflect, and momentarily disengage from ego-driven ambition. His practice gestures toward the restoration of three essential relationships often strained by modern life: with one another, with the earth, and with the Divine. In this season of restraint, the exhibition offers art as an opportunity to return to the world with renewed clarity and care.

 

Click here to view catalogue

 

7 AM - 4 PM | Mondays - Fridays

Closed on Weekends & Public Holidays

Main Lobby, World Trade Center 3

Jl. Jenderal Sudirman No.Kav. 29-31, Jakarta

 

 

In March, Jumaadi will unveil four major exhibitions across Australia and Asia, spanning one solo and three international group presentations. At AVA Perth, his solo exhibition Paper skin chisel foregrounds his fluid movement across painting, drawing, installation, and performance. Drawing from wayang kulit and Javanese aesthetic lineages, Jumaadi’s poetic iconography of meditations on love, conflict, and belonging, shaped by his life between Java and Sydney. Aligning with his practice and the perusal of form and symbolism, this idea extends to Faces & Figures, an exhibition at Mizuma Gallery, a group exhibition that interprets the inner world through recognizable façades.

 

He will also participate in The Rhinoceros and the Unicorn at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, an institutional exhibition reinterpreting traditional folktales through largely wordless visual narratives, inviting viewers to construct meaning beyond fixed endings.

 

In Shanghai, Jumaadi joins Down to Earth at Tank Shanghai, a curatorial project emerging from the TANK Curator Prize that reconsiders human relationships with land, ecology, and interspecies connection. This positions his practice within urgent global conversations on rootedness, reciprocity, and coexistence.

 

 

Food for Thought

D Gallerie Jakarta

7 March – 7 April 2026

 

Sillyndris is will be exhibiting at D Gallerie Jakarta as part of their new Unserious Series, presenting two new works that examine memory, desire, and systems of control. In Since You Left, I Cured (2025), a photographic fragment of a pig is juxtaposed with imagery of processed meat, contrasting what is rejected as raw and taboo with what is sanitized and socially consumable. The work reflects on how memory is curated—how uncomfortable truths are buried while their “processed” versions are embraced. In What’s Left for Us (2025), industrial materials and a bacon-scented element evoke appetite without nourishment, positioning hunger as a manufactured condition. Sillyndris points to how systems sustain anticipation rather than fulfillment, normalizing lack as a structure of control.

 

10 AM – 7 PM | Mondays - Fridays

10 AM – 6 PM | Saturdays - Sundays

D Gallerie

Jl. Barito 1 No. 3, South Jakarta

 

This March, ISA Art Gallery is pleased to highlight Dabi Arnasa, a Yogyakarta-based artist whose practice navigates the porous boundary between dream and waking life. A graduate of the Indonesia Institute of the Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta, he first introduced his distinct visual language through his solo presentation Cabinet of Dreams at Art Moments Jakarta 2022, drawing from both personal and shared dream imagery.

 

Rooted in the Balinese philosophy of rwa bhineda, the dynamic balance of opposing forces, Dabi reconstructs dream fragments into surreal, painterly compositions that feel at once intimate and estranged. His canvases hold contradiction in suspension: the familiar and the uncanny, harmony and disquiet, reality and subconscious projection.

 

Following his participation in a group exhibition at EDSU House (2025), Dabi is currently featured in Biophilia: Exquisite Corpse at ISA Art Gallery. His painting The Mirror and the Fire Lily is an afterlife of severance. Portraying a landscape destroyed from scorched earth, fire lilies grow at the site. A species of flower that emerges only after the fire has passed, the fire lily symbolizes survival and renewal after loss.

 

Dabi will present a new body of work at R.J. Katamsi Gallery at ISI Yogyakarta this April, continuing his exploration of dream logic as a site of psychological and cultural negotiation.