BWP Focus: S. Teddy D. reintroduces a selection of works by the late Indonesian maverick artist produced between 1999 and 2012. The works are positioned as still-active questions in contemporary visual culture and feel just as intense today as they must have when they were first created. The exhibition runs from 13 June to 25 July 2025 at Langgeng Art Space.
Building from the curatorial direction, titled Tubuh Tanpa Wajah: Intensitas dan Kekacauan dalam Gambar S. Teddy D. (Body Without a Face: Intensity and Chaos in the Drawings of S. Teddy D.), suggests that drawings function as spaces of collision where emotion, memory, and form interact without resolution. Anchoring this idea, the curatorial frame points to this body of work as one that does not try to explain but instead insists on being experienced, and the drawings are marked by intensity.
That energy becomes especially visible through S. Teddy’s recurring focus on the human body, which appears across the works in fractured, exaggerated, or dissolving forms. These figures are not symbolic, nor do they represent stable identities. In the works in this exhibition, the body is used to express internal pressure. A figure holds both a child and a hoe with equal weight. Soldiers appear frozen in uniform expressions. Heads shrink, explode, or simply vanish. These gestures do not point to one fixed meaning. They instead suggest unresolved emotional states.
This commitment to emotional complexity also shapes how the works operate within the broader field of visual culture. Many exhibitions today focus on artworks that are easy to understand or carry direct critique. S. Teddy’s work, however, resists that kind of readability, but he worked with contradiction, allowing humour, violence, fatigue, warmth to appear in the same image. The discomfort that emerges in these works is a feature that keeps the viewer from settling too quickly into interpretation.
Because of this quality, the curatorial structure of the exhibition follows a non-linear approach, where they’re not arranged by specific year, theme, or technique. They are placed in relation to one another through mood and intensity. This method respects the artist’s process, which often avoided refinement and rejected fixed categories. Visitors are encouraged to move through the space without needing to decode or conclude. What holds the works together is the sensation of being close to something unstable.
This exhibition is shaped by the larger partnership between Ace House Collective and Equator Art Projects, which began their collaboration in 2025 at Langgeng Art Space. Through this shared platform, they aim to support curatorial practices that value continuity and close attention to how artists actually work. The BWP Focus program plays a role in that effort by offering space to revisit the practices of artists whose influence remains active until today. In the case of S. Teddy D., this influence appears through works that are still loud, still raw, and full of questions that still matter today.
Ace House Collective | Equator Art Projects
BWP Focus: S. Teddy D.
13 June — 25 July 2025
Ace House — Langgeng Art Space,
Jl. Suryodiningratan No. 37,
Yogyakarta 55141, Indonesia
