ARTJOG 2025 presents Motif: Amalan (practice) as the final chapter in the MOTIF trilogy, following Lamaran in 2023 and Ramalan in 2024. Curated by Hendro Wiyanto, Bambang ‘Toko’ Witjaksono, and Ignatia Nilu, this year’s exhibition investigates artistic practice as a lived method of relating to the world where it is often seen as persistent, repetitive, and shaped by the demands of place, material, and the urgencies of the present day.
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This year, Motif: Amalan returns to the practice itself. As it is repeated, interrupted, or reshaped in everyday life, including within family, community, spiritual, and institutional settings. The exhibition runs from 20 June to 31 August 2025 at Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Rather than emphasising formal experimentation or visual language alone, the curatorial focus turns to how meaning is produced through labour, maintenance, adaptation, and intimate forms of decision-making. This orientation questions aesthetic discourse that isolates the artwork as a singular object, separated from the artist’s conditions of production and the longer cycles of engagement that precede it.
In 2023, Motif: Lamaran explored the gestures through which artists offered their work to specific audiences and institutions, attending to the protocols, permissions, and refusals embedded in acts of artistic offering. The following year, Motif: Ramalan reflected on how artists respond to instability through imagination, whether by constructing speculative futures, intervening in collective narratives, or envisioning alternative timelines.
This year’s presentation includes 47 participating artists and new commissioned works by Anusapati and REcycle EXPerience, as well as special projects by Murakabi Movement, Ruang Rupa, and Devfto Printmaking Institute. The works emerge from diverse conditions. Some are based on long-term engagement with conventional craftsmanship and local production networks, others build on participatory research conducted with marginalised urban communities. Several respond to shifting religious sensibilities, the bureaucratisation of public space, or the commodification of collective memory. These practices are not treated as fixed narratives, but operate as lived propositions that continue to unfold across time and place.
This piece opens an ongoing series that will follow ARTJOG 2025 throughout its run. In the coming weeks, we will return to specific works, programmes, and conversations shaped by Motif: Amalan, paying close attention to how artistic practices unfold within and beyond the exhibition space, aiming to stay close to the questions that emerge from the works and their contexts.
