No one–not even the artist–is ever powerful enough to shed everything that ties them to childhood, to place, to the world they were shaped by. One may discard what clings only to the surface of consciousness, but much has seeped too deep–into the nerves and beneath the awareness.

—Sanento Yuliman

Art is the declaration of experience. A mountain may be painted a hundred times over, yet each rendering carries its own story, its own interpretation, its own psychological weather. We, as human beings, never truly see the same thing twice. What Sanento affirms is exactly that our way of seeing–includes as artists, is always entangled with memory, experience, and the life that has made us who we are.

In artistic practice, perspective does not always arrive as a straightforward way of looking at things visually. It is, at its core, a lens that allows us to process an event from many angles and landscapes at once. From this emerges a multiplicity of perception—conclusions drawn from the accumulation of experiences that shape how we understand the world. Then, the truths we hold—even in this very moment as we read these words—exist because of perception.

In this sense, art offers a bridge, one that opens up new and sometimes strange, unfamiliar ways of seeing, yet proves remarkably capable of touching what has long been kept at a distance. The ten artists gathered within this exhibition arrive through vastly different ways of seeing, each carrying their own distinct sensibility. Each one is adept at bringing forth realities that may appear, at a glance, to resemble one another, yet reveal themselves as entirely different worlds once you step inside.

Through Refracted, perspective no longer dwells in certainty but instead, it dissolves into a fluid field of interpretation. Each work becomes a medium that bends experience—fracturing it, then shifting it across an expanse of possibilities. Each artist appears at times to leap beyond the boundaries of form that have long become their habitus. These gestures do not arrive as acts of defiance, but as a means of endurance in translating sensations of experience that now feel ever more rapidly in flux. From there, we are invited to slow down and make peace with the traces of a life that has never been free from change. A Reminder that uncertainty is not something to be conquered, but to be inhabited as a reality that has always walked beside us, and in many ways, it is this very feeling that shapes how we see, sense, and understand the world.

Written by Made Chandra

Artists:

• Aharimu

• Didin Jirot

• Kania Giana

• Kuncir SV

• Natasha Lubis

• NPAAW

• Rama Indirawan

• Sakde Oka

• Surya Subratha

• Wicitra Pradnyaratih