Let Them Eat Cake! : exhibition co-organized by Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society and KADIST

Let Them Eat Cake! responds to the widening distance between power and the everyday. Across Asia and beyond, small gestures of excess or indifference have repeatedly ignited political awakening–from youth-led uprisings in Nepal, to mass mobilizations in Indonesia. What begins as individual frustration thickens into shared recognition, and then into movement. The exhibition traces the fragile, electrifying moment when ordinary people refuse to accept detachment as destiny.

The works examine how power embeds itself in landscapes, bodies, and collective memory. Liu Yu’s Salvation Mountain drifts through California’s ghost towns and extractive imaginaries, where dreams of freedom blur with the afterlives of mining and Silicon Valley’s new gold rush. Elena Tejada-Herrera’s Las Bambas pairs tenderness with toxicity, intertwining gestures of care with burning vegetation and the unresolved conflicts surrounding copper extraction in the Peruvian Andes.

Binelde Hyrcan’s Cambeck follows four Angolan boys as they imagine different futures amid war, poverty, and migration. UuDam Tran Nguyen’s Waltz of the Machine Equestrians stages a motorbike procession through Vietnam, bright plastic armor oscillating between humor and shared precarity. The work echoes the widely circulated image of Affan, a Gojek driver killed during a demonstration, an incident that intensified public anger and reshaped the protests. Akiq Aw’s Indonesian Family Portraits encounters the ideological remains of the New Order’s state-imposed nuclear family, one of many monuments that still haunt village entrances long after the regime’s end.

Wong Wai Yin’s grainy, masked protest image and Xyza Cruz Bacani’s photographs from the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong hold space for dissent across generations. Bani Abidi’s Death at a 30 Degree Angle peels back the facade of political self-mythologizing, revealing the labor and absurdity beneath monumental power.

Presented as a one-night screening, Arin Rungjang’s 24624759624891410 2516… And then there were none listens for the echoes of protest around Thailand’s Democracy Monument, histories that official narratives cannot contain. The work resonates amid Indonesia’s ongoing efforts to rewrite historical memory and elevate Soeharto as a national hero: monuments become battlegrounds, and symbolic gestures reveal the political machinery beneath.

The exhibition includes a new commission by Elia Nurvista that extends her research on the extractive palm oil industry, which is rooted in colonial practices and history.

Let Them Eat Cake! is co-organized by Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society and KADIST, as part of KADIST’s ongoing international program, Double Takes. The exhibition is co-curated by Mira Asriningtyas, Dito Yuwono (Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society), and Shona Mei Findlay (KADIST).