In the Name of Our Mother on Earth: Dian Suci’s Attempt to Embrace Feminine Spirituality
What happens when prayer is no longer directed toward the sky, but returns to the ground beneath our feet? This question greets visitors as they enter BAIK ART in Jakarta for Dian Suci’s solo exhibition In the Name of Our Mother on Earth, curated by Ibrahim Soetomo.
Dian presents her works with a strong awareness of spatial dynamics, using bodily experience and object processes as metaphors. Paintings, installations, wood carvings, textile objects, natural elements, and a video work are arranged as a continuous experience that invites visitors to slow down and reconsider the relationship between body, home, and spirituality.
The exhibition’s central idea emerges from the inversion of the widely known patriarchal prayer, “Our Father in Heaven.” Dian Suci shifts the center of spirituality toward a much older system rooted in cosmology and matrilineal lineage. Through this approach, her artistic practice draws from everyday female experience, maternality, domestic labour, and the relationship between craft practice and the logic of production.
In the painting gallery, visitors encounter a solitary female figure wearing a red house dress. She rarely meets the viewer’s gaze. Her face is often obscured or turned away, appearing in moments of private prayer or quiet embrace. Surrounding her are recurring symbols, a burning rose, an open clam, and a split pomegranate. These motifs refer to healing, care, and the long history of femininity, from herbal traditions to ancient mythology that associates the pomegranate with love and divinity.
The compositions create an intimate dialogue. The paintings function as silent monologues that exist even without an audience. Within this stillness, Dian constructs reflections on womanhood and emotional experiences that resist articulation.
A different approach emerges in the installations. While the paintings operate within an intrapersonal realm, the spatial works address women’s social positions. Layers of translucent fabric, text, and suspended wood carvings shape an environment that physically involves the visitor. In this practice, Dian Suci explores the intersection between domestic narratives and state power. Her personal observations as a woman, daughter, and single mother become the foundation for engaging broader structural issues.
Dian’s critique unfolds through the gradual unravelling of collective experiences she once inhabited. In the Name of Our Mother on Earth marks a new chapter in Dian Suci’s artistic journey following her previous solo exhibition Aku pingin crita dawa. Nanging apa kowe kuwawa? Aku kuwawa? in 2018. Through the exhibition as a whole, Dian Suci proposes an understanding of power that grows without domination, emerging through the lived experience of feminine spirituality.
The exhibition runs from 14 Ferbuary until 14 March 2026 at Baik Art Gallery, Jl. Sekolah Duta V No.35, Pondok Indah, South Jakarta.
