A Site of Memory: Alisa Chunchue and Mar Kristoff at ara contemporary
In September, ara contemporary will open its doors with a dual offering: two solo exhibitions unfolding across its Main Gallery and Focus Gallery, featuring the works of Alisa Chunchue and Mar Kristoff. Although housed in separate spaces, their presentations resonate with one another, weaving a dialogue around the certainties and uncertainties shared in remembrance. The galleries become not simply containers for two distinct voices, but rather sites where these voices echo, overlap, and converse through their shared preoccupation with recollection and its tenuous nature.
Occupying the Main Gallery, Alisa Chunchue presents an arresting series of works that map inscriptions upon her own body. At the heart of her presentation is Wound, a profound meditation on grief, and the dual processes of pain and healing. Since 2020, Alisa approaches the act of drawing not merely as mark-making but as ritual, employing what she describes as “methodical meditative drawings.” With pencil in hand, she mimics surgical techniques, and creates mirrors between opening-closing and cutting-binding; collectively forming the cycles of rupture and restoration in survival. This act of suturing (which is both simultaneously violent and restorative) becomes a metaphor for the fragile work of living through and with memory, as Alisa attempts to mend what has been broken while acknowledging the scars that remain.
Her fascination with the physical embodiment of memory extends into sculptural form through Invisible Suture (2022–24) and Stitching (2024). In these glass works, Alisa channels tenderness into a material often perceived as cold and rigid. Through her hands, she moulds the fragility of glass into a supple and sensuous material, creating “glistening strong skeletons” balanced with “organic flowing gentle curves.” These pieces articulate the contradictions of transparency and vulnerability, suggesting that memories inscribed in the body are like glass: enduring and precarious. In this space, what lies is the cumulative force of Alisa’s practice, as she crosses materials and mediums to enliven a litany of her survival. Together, her art becomes a breathing process of resilience, embodied across drawing, sculpture, and the performative engagement of her own body.
In the more intimate setting of the Focus Gallery, Mar Kristoff turns inward to wrestle with his own positionality, negotiating between the roles of participant and outsider. His works revolve around painting, yet the medium is treated as a site of intervention rather than a mere and passive depiction. Using family photographs and found objects as his base material, Mar interrogates the assumption that these artifacts are “neutral vessels of memory.” Instead, he destabilizes them—referring to this mode of “blurring, reframing, displacing”—so that what emerges is not a recollection, but a speculative reimagining. His work stands as a form of painterly manipulations, and reveals memory as an unstable, partial, and constantly shifting site. Each canvas is ambivalent, as it pushes against the linearity of time and the illusion of permanence. Kristoff ultimately asks: In remembering, whose truth is given form, and whose narratives remain unseen?
Together, Alisa and Mar sit as parallels as they bring forward distinct yet intertwined visual narratives. Their practices concern a re-materialisation of drawing, sculpture, painting, and assemblage, as they probe the personal and the collective dimensions of memory. Their work establishes ara contemporary not solely as a place of exhibition but also of meditation. In every piece, there is a place to reflect, to remember, and perhaps, to reset.
Both exhibitions will be open to the public from 27 September to 2 November 2025. ara contemporary is located at Jl. Tulodong Bawah I no. 16, Senayan, Kebayoran Baru and its operational hours are Tuesday-Saturday from 11AM to 7pm and they are available on Sunday based on appointment.
