Open Studio: Nessa Theo
Nessa Theo
5 – 28 March 2025
“Our Love Has Never Not Been Bordered”
05-28 March 2025
Nessa Theo’s practice has been focused on different modes in talking about Chinese Indonesians community as the “other” in various categories, such as familiar and foreign; colonizer and colonized. She also seeks artistic, historical, and pedagogical methods and methodologies for discussing the history of belonging, violence, and survival strategies, through an inter-class, inter-racial, and inter-generational perspective.
In this Open Studio, she will explore these methods and also dive into her latest research theme about romance and interracial marriage in the late Dutch colonial period in Java. Her work interrogates the entanglements of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism in love, while also exploring women’s agency within this domain.
*Open Studio is one of Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society program that focuses on artistic experimentation, and the development of discourse on works by artists. This program is one of the new forms of using the Cemeti Stockroom space which is held regularly and is open to artists, either by invitation or submission of proposals.
Documentation
Biography
Nessa Theo is a visual artist and researcher based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Aware that the academic world, with its theories and arguments often presented textually, is highly exclusive, she explores different approaches and articulations through art. Her work processes and transforms theoretical jargon into the realm of emotion. She also incorporates community-based projects into her practice to create spaces for the exchange of memories and identities, aimed at collective liberation. Overall, her works challenge stereotypes, thus revealing gaps and inconsistencies in racial constructions, both those imposed on and perpetuated by the Chinese-Indonesian community. In her practice, art and artistic research are positioned as tools for investigation, dissemination, and pedagogy, with the goal of transformation.