Closing 2025, ara contemporary Presents Two Cross-Thematic Exhibitions
Closing its exhibition program for the year, ara contemporary presents its final two shows of 2025. At the Main Gallery, artist Condro Priyoaji unveils his latest exploration of light, reflection, and stillness in the solo exhibition The Stillness of Becoming, featuring an exhibition set designed in collaboration with architecture firm FFFAAARRR. Meanwhile, in the Focus Gallery, the duo exhibition Longer, Linger & Angler brings together works by Pande Wardina and Xiuching Tsay, extending ara contemporary’s ongoing collaboration with Nonfrasa (Bali) to examine tradition, memory, and the shifting boundaries of cultural imagination.
The Stillness of Becoming marks Priyoaji’s fourth solo exhibition. Since the beginning of his practice, the artist has been known for his persistent attempt to capture motion, impermanence, and states of transition–only to freeze them into quiet, contemplative visuals. While his earlier works revolved around the interplay of light within natural landscapes, this new series turns toward light’s encounter with human-made interventions: mirrors, rippling water, and reflective surfaces.
In this latest body of work, Priyoaji observes how water, though seemingly still, refracts light in ways that suggest movement and new forms. Visual reality, for him, is nothing more than the reflection of light upon surrounding objects. Through his monochromatic paintings, he invites viewers to experience the dualities inherent in perception: light and dark, stillness and motion, the tangible and the intangible. In Priyoaji’s view, stillness is a pause within the ongoing flow of movement.
The collaboration with FFFAAARRR deepens the spatial experience of the exhibition. Known for working at the intersection of architecture and other creative practices, the firm sees Priyoaji’s sensitivity toward light, water, and atmosphere as a natural resonance with their own approach.
For this exhibition, they divided the gallery into several corridors, each presenting individual works in their own isolated settings. This arrangement allows viewers to encounter each piece as a “fragment of time”, as if witnessing a single moment suspended from a chain of movement. The subtle addition of trickling water further enriches the atmosphere, amplifying the immersive quality of Priyoaji’s visual language.
At the Focus Gallery, ara contemporary and Nonfrasa present Longer, Linger & Angler, featuring works by Thai artist Xiuching Tsay and Indonesian artist Pande Wardina. The exhibition positions tradition not as a fixed entity, but as a field of inquiry; a space where memory, rediscovery, and reinterpretation are constantly in motion.
Tsay approaches domestic space as an archaeological site, excavating ritual objects and everyday gestures before reassembling them into layered, fragile forms. Her stacked paintings, collages, and delicate assemblages question origins, continuity, and the way memory slips between clarity and distortion.
Wardina, on the other hand, examines how rituals can be reinterpreted through bricolage, simple electronics, and digital disruptions. Using found objects, handmade circuits, and low-tech mechanisms, he creates a dynamic tension between the sacred and the profane.
Both Tsay and Wardina work within constraints—material, technological, or cultural—which they treat not as limitations but as tools for inquiry. Their works raise similar questions: How can the ineffable or intangible be conveyed through imperfect, even broken media? How can memory’s persistence be represented without lapsing into nostalgia or simplistic metaphor?
With these two exhibitions, ara contemporary closes the year with a thoughtful reflection on perception, tradition, and the ways we interpret the world; through bent light, layered memory, and stillness marked by possibility.
