2026-03-23 13:15
In a stark red room, Melati Suryodarmo moves slowly, a large sheet of glass balanced in her arms. The surface is transparent yet weighty—at 40kg—its fragility at odds with the strain it demands. As she walks, she repeats a simple phrase: “I love you.” Over and over, the words leave her lips, neither whispered nor proclaimed, but carried through breath and muscle. The colour red evokes love and passion, but also urgency and danger. The glass threatens to shatter. The declaration begins to feel less like confession than labour.
The Indonesian artist performed her 2007 work I Love You at the UBS Art Studio during Art SG’s vernissage this January, with video documentation from the UBS Art Collection on view for the remainder of the fair. The performance is described as transforming “a simple declaration into a ritual of longing, resilience and endurance”. Watching Suryodarmo carry the glass, one understands why. What appears intimate becomes structural. The body is not illustrating emotion; it is bearing it. The phrase shifts from personal expression to physical burden, enacted in real time—across three hours—before an audience asked to sit with its slow, accumulating tension.
For Suryodarmo, the body is “a container of a life journey of someone”. It is both medium and message, holding the residue of experience while generating new meanings through action. Her performances rarely narrate personal stories directly. “I don’t talk about my personal relationship for I Love You,” she explains, even if embodied experience inevitably forms its layers. Instead, she treats the body as material—non-static, ageing, continuously shaped by time. “The body is a never-ending resource,” she tells us when we meet the next day on the fairgrounds. “You progress, you age; with each new experience, you also become a new trigger for yourself.”
This understanding was sharpened while developing her practice in Germany starting in the mid-1990s, where she studied under the mentorship of the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović. Suryodarmo credits her teacher for not only instilling discipline and endurance, but for demonstrating how performance might be sustained beyond the live moment. “My teacher Marina Abramović properly archived her works. Without those earlier records, how would we know her practice has existed since the 1970s?” she notes. Documentation, for Suryodarmo, is not an afterthought but evidence—an insistence that performance belongs within art history rather than existing as an ephemeral aside.
Yet Suryodarmo was never content to remain within Abramović’s shadow. “I have a different priority for my art practice; I have a different agency,” she says. Working between Germany and Indonesia, she began to interrogate the frameworks through which performance art had been theorised and taught. Western philosophy and feminist discourse provided intellectual scaffolding, but they emerged from specific sociopolitical conditions. “I think the western theory cannot be used to see the reality of my cultural surroundings, my cultural background,” she reflects. To rely solely on those models risked reproducing the hierarchies of colonial knowledge.
Instead, Suryodarmo turned to ritual and embodied cultural memory. In Javanese traditions, the body is not only expressive but communal—used in practices of healing, trance and collective experience. Performance, in this context, does not necessarily position itself against convention; it can function as a shared ritual.
One of her most notable performances is Exergie – Butter Dance, which was first staged in 2000 in Berlin before travelling to cities around the world. In its original iteration, Suryodarmo drew inspiration from a traditional Indonesian dance, performing while standing atop blocks of butter, and accompanied by the sounds of traditional drums. In Transaction of Hollows (2016), she draws on Javanese archery, releasing 800 arrows into a drywall with thunderous impact, while in Eins und Eins (2016), she reimagines a country as a human body reacting with bouts of nausea to oppression, aggression and violence, vomiting mouthfuls of black ink onto white walls.
She began to ask what it means to perform within a body shaped by colonial histories and inherited trauma, while also acknowledging survival and continuity. “This body is a product of colonial history and trauma,” she says, but adds that distance from that past is also possible through reflection and lived experience. The archive she carries is not fixed; it evolves with time.
Gender also inevitably shapes how that body is read. Raised in Solo, or Surakarta, in Central Java, within a merchant family where women led the business, Suryodarmo’s understanding of feminism is rooted in lived experience rather than theory. “Feminism for me is a living experience; it’s an embodied experience in my family,” she says. Living to Germany revealed different expectations and inequalities making her aware that feminist discourse cannot be applied uniformly across cultures. “It depends on where it grows, and where it is applicable,” she reflects. Her performances carry this layered awareness, acknowledging that the female body is interpreted through shifting cultural lenses. Dialogue with My Sleepless Tyrant (2013), for example, serves as a metaphor for a woman struggling within the conforming expectations of society. Suryodarmo lies trapped between mattresses—a physical expression of constraint and resistance.
If performance art is inherently ephemeral, Suryodarmo approaches its afterlife with pragmatism. The presentation of I Love You at Art SG 2026 marks her first performance within an art fair context, aligned with the work’s inclusion in the UBS Art Collection. She rejects the notion that documentation diminishes authenticity. “The live performance has never really been able to be replaced by the digital formats. But the spirit and the message, I think we still can capture from good documentation,” she says. Archiving, for her, is an ethical responsibility—to ensure that performance art remains part of collective cultural memory.
This commitment extends to her work in Solo, where Suryodarmo has established Studio Plesungan in 2012 as both personal workspace and community platform. The creative space hosts workshops, festivals and children’s programmes, offering younger artists space to experiment and learn. She also teaches performance art in the region, encouraging students to engage with the body as material while situating their practice within local histories. “Performance art [has long been positioned] within visual art as a peripheral practice. After more than half century of working with the body, I think it’s no longer appropriate to just leave this [practice] behind without developing its knowledge,” she says of performance art’s place within the visual arts. Transmission becomes another form of archiving.
Looking ahead, Suryodarmo is less concerned with pushing her body to extremes than with expanding how performance is encountered and sustained. “I cannot force my body. [Choosing the body] as a medium requires an awareness of one’s life—health, condition and limits,” she reflects. New works incorporate installation, sound and collaboration, extending the reach of her ideas without abandoning the centrality of the body. Performance, she suggests, is not only an act but a philosophy of attention.
When she performs, she enters what she describes as a state of presence. “I just live in the moment,” she says. “It’s not a show for me. It’s the art of doing.” That insistence on process over spectacle defines her practice. The body does not simply represent memory; it enacts it. Through repetition, endurance and time, Suryodarmo reveals the body as a living archive—one that continues to record, reinterpret and transmit the complexities of human experience.
Related Artists: MELATI SURYODARMO 麦拉蒂·苏若道默
Facebook
Instagram
WeChat 微信