Longer, Linger & Angler

Continuing the gallery's ongoing collaboration with Nonfrasa Gallery (Bali, Indonesia), ara contemporary is delighted to present Longer, Linger & Angler. The duo exhibition, featuring works of Thai artist Xiuching Tsay and Indonesian artist Pande Wardina, cultivates a space where the persistence of tradition becomes a site of inquiry, where the boundary between memory and invention is porous, and where engaging with cultural material is inseparable from questioning. They invite us to reconsider distinctions between presence and absence, familiarity and strangeness, tradition and innovation. Here, tradition is a living dialogue, constantly haunted by what it has yet to become.

Tsay's work reconstructs the domestic as an archaeology, excavating ritual objects and gestures that reappear in layered, fragile forms. Her layered paintings and fragile assemblages question the idea of origin and continuity. By stacking, collaging, and unbuilding, Tsay's practice mimics the way memory displaces itself, slipping between clarity and delusion. Wardina's work interrogates the viability of rituals mediated through bricolage, mechanics, and digital delays. His use of low-tech electronics, salvaged objects, and handmade circuits creates a dialogue between the sacred and the profane. Both artists work within constraints, material, technical, and cultural, that serve as tools of inquiry. What unites Tsay and Wardina is their strategic embrace of constraints. Material, cultural, and technological limitations do not restrict but instead actively shape their work. How can we convey the ineffable, the intangible, through imperfect or broken media? How do we represent memory's persistence, and its inevitable loss, without resorting to nostalgia or facile metaphors?