KAMU DARI MANA (WHERE ARE YOU FROM?) Exhibition at CushCush Gallery
Hiền Hoàng (VN/DE)
Nindya Nareswari (ID/DE)
Phạm Minh Đức (VN/DE)
Zelin Seah (MY)
23 – 25 January 2026
10.00-21.00 WITA
Dealing in Distance is a mini festival bringing together Southeast Asian artists and artists from the Southeast Asian diaspora to re-read and rearticulate practices of diaspora and migration—particularly in relation to Germany—through artistic research and intercultural exchange. Initiated by four Goethe-Instituts in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi) and conceived as a platform for research-based practice, the programme understands knowledge as an ongoing process rather than a fixed conclusion, moving between local and global contexts.
Building on these aims, the programme is conceptually framed by the programme curator, RED Nguyễn Hải Yến, who draws on the idea that identity does not grow from a single origin, but from multiple connections. Shaped by the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this approach is articulated through the image of the rhizome, which spreads horizontally to form networks instead of singular roots. In dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s notion of relational identity, diaspora is understood as a condition shaped by movement, encounter, and overlapping multicultural, postcolonial, and transnational histories.
Aligned with Goethe-Institut’s commitment to dialogue and mobility, the festival travels to Bali for its third iteration, realised in collaboration with two local curators, Wayan Sumahardika and Savitri Sastrawan. The programme unfolds through exhibitions, performances, workshops, talks, and walking tours, presenting encounters—often uneven and unresolved—between contemporary Southeast Asian diasporic, Indonesian, and Balinese artists.
Bali provides a critical lens to reflect on belonging beyond fixed definitions, shaped by plural worldviews, histories of migration and tourism, and ongoing negotiations between tradition and contemporary experience. Within this context, Bali is an active site where historical layers and contemporary negotiations intersect, and thus, this edition’s concept “KAMU DARI MANA? (WHERE ARE YOU FROM?)” finds clear resonance.
Rather than seeking an “authentic” Balinese identity, Dealing in Distance invites artists and audiences to read Bali as an unfinished process—an assemblage in which diaspora, history, and mobility intertwine without promises of stability. Across experiences of loss, longing, resistance, and resilience, “home” never appears as a final destination, but as something continuously imagined, dismantled, and renegotiated through openness and uncertainty.
Exhibiting artists at CushCush Gallery:
Hiền Hoàng
Hiền Hoàng (b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist working between Germany, UK and Vietnam. Her practice moves across photography, moving image, installation, and scientific research, exploring how violence and displacement leave traces on landscapes and humans. Her multi-channel performance video “Made in Rice” emerges from her encounter with racial discrimination at Hamburg Central Station. Using rice as metaphor, it confronts Western projections onto Asian bodies and the persistent myth of the “good immigrant.”
Nindya Nareswari
Nindya Nareswari is an Indonesian light artist and designer based in Berlin (Germany). Her artistic practice delves into themes of human perception and ephemerality, using light as a universal yet profoundly personal medium to reevaluate how we engage with the world. “What remains, reminds” uses food and light to bridge the distance between two homes. Rice paper becomes a fragile yet resilient vessel for memory, holding traces of sunlight. The shifting light acknowledges absence through what remains, its subtle movements turning impermanence into rhythm, an invitation to embrace life’s transience.
Phạm Minh Đức
Phạm Minh Đức is a Berlin-based artist and performer trained in Exhibition Design and Scenography at HfG Karlsruhe, and Performance Studies and Design Theory at UdK Berlin. Working across visual and performing arts, his practice explores identity at the intersections of gender, race, and class. “Fountains of A High Mountain and A Sweet Dream” invites collective reflection on memory and historical erasure. The work addresses the reproductive injustices experienced by Vietnamese contract laborers in the GDR, centering women who carried grief far from home and those they loved.
Zelin Seah
Zelin Seah is a Malaysian visual artist and lecturer whose practice examines the entanglements of land, memory, and material trace. Through long-term research, his work investigates how extractive economies and postcolonial regimes imprint onto bodies, maps, and landscapes. “Wilsst du mit uns gehen? (Would you come with us?)” reflects on being a Southeast Asian migrant in Germany – visible through labor, invisible in society. Beginning with blankets covering homeless bodies and filled with palm-oil waste & found materials, it reveals tensions between EU ecological policies and lived realities.
OPENING NIGHT
22 January 2026
6:00 PM (WITA)
CushCush Gallery
Jl. Teuku Umar Gg. Rajawali No. 1A
Denpasar, Bali
Cooking Performance & Food Sharing
“Mengguh Desa Les: Exploring the Diversity of Flavors in Bali”
by Don Rare Nadiana x Wulan Dewi Saraswati
Mengguh is a traditional culinary dish from Tejakula District, Buleleng Regency, which exists in various forms across different villages. In Les Village, Mengguh functions not only as everyday food but also occupies an important place in the community’s social and cultural practices. This dish is almost always present at celecrations, religious ceremonies, and family gatherings.
Its defining characteristic lies in its level of doneness, locally referred to as “mata katak” (frog’s eye). Local residents often call it “Bubuh China”, a name that reflects the long history of cross-cultural interaction in the region. In this context, Bubuh Mengguh can be understood as an archive of taste that connects present generations with their historical roots while reflecting processes of cultural adaptation to social and environmental change.
Don Rare Nadiana
is a regenerative tourism practitioner from Desa Les and a travel writer for tatkala.co. As a traveler, guide, and trader, he integrates personal experience into sustainable tourism practices that support local culture, nature, and the community’s economy.
Wulan Dewi Saraswati
born in Denpasar, 1994, she is a writer, director, and educator who views art as a space for healing and education. She is active as the Artistic Director and founder of Komunitas Aghumi, a performing arts space that positions tarot as an artistic expression and a medium for social reflection.
Music Performance
“Before the Pulse Fails”
by Wayan Gde Yudane x Putu Septa
The essence of life; just as a pulse confirms a person is alive, the “pulse” of a situation can be its central activity, energy, or purpose. For the pulse to fail, is for that essence to be lost.
Wayan Gde Yudane
is a contemporary and experimental music composer known for his cross-cultural works that bridge Eastern and Western musical traditions. His diverse practice spans gamelan, Western string ensembles, electro-acoustic performance, film, art, installation, and theatre, and his contributions have been recognized with numerous national and international awards.
Dance Performance
“Mai Mai Melali: Following the Traces of “Willst du mi tuns gehen?”
by I Putu Oka Surya Pratama
This performance was created as a response to Seah Zelin’s “Willst du mit uns gehen?”, which highlights the experiences of Southeast Asian migrants in Europe. Whereas Zelin uses blankets and residual palm oil industry materials to explore the body, labor, and overlooked lives, this performance brings similar questions into the context of Bali and diaspora.
Rather than presenting Bali as a complete or exotic cultural identity, the performance approaches the Balinese body as a body in motion—experiencing displacement, existing between languages, customs, and histories.
I Putu Oka Surya Pratama
known affectionately as Oka, hails from Bali. His dance journey began in elementary school. He joined the Ratna Kumara Studio and the Warini Bali Dance Studio to explore Balinese dance traditions. Born in Denpasar on April 29, 2001, Oka completed his undergraduate studies at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Bali, majoring in Dance, in 2023. He then pursued a Master’s degree at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta, graduating in 2025.
Performance
“in waiting / một chờ đợi”
by Ha Thuy Hang
As an attempt to position time as an embodied experience in waiting/một chờ đợi, Ha Thuy Hang moves within a liminal zone between not yet embarking and not yet reaching.
Ha Thuy Hang
is a Vietnamese multimedia composer, sound artist, and electronic improviser whose diverse practice revolves around exploring local artistic culture at the intersection of tradition and modernity. In 2018, she founded The Future of Tradition, a project aimed at young people interested in preserving and developing traditional culture and arts, sponsored by Famlab – British Council. In 2019 and 2020, she was honored as Artist of The Year by Hanoi Grapevine, and in 2022, she received the prestigious Prince Claus Seed Awards (Netherlands). Her works have been shown in Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Germany, and others.
PUBLIC PROGRAM at CushCush Gallery:
PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOP
Textile Landscape with Vita Wulansari
23 January 2026
15.00
CushCush Gallery
Together with artist Vita Wulansari, participants are invited to paint, sew, and eco-print motifs on a broad cloth or to-be-clothing to become a textile landscape relating to each other’s identities, memories, and personal narratives. The process opens space for dialogue around diasporic experiences and functions as a meditative reflection following the exhibition visit.
Vita Wulansari
is a fashion design lecturer who uses elements of fashion and photography to create her artworks. Her works are very much rooted to her identities as a Chinese Balinese and wedded to a Balinese Hindu family. At times her works are also related to global issues. Vita has exhibited at SIKA Gallery, Discovery Shopping Mall, Room8 Art Shop, Bentara Budaya Bali, and ISI Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia.
TALKS
Tracing Identity Through Living Archives with Gatari Surya Kusuma, I Ngurah Suryawan, Nelden Djakababa Gericke, Phạm Minh Đức
24 January 2026
14.00
CushCush Gallery
This conversation reflects on how human movement such as migration, displacement, and travel are shaping memory, identity, and relationships to place. Land is approached not only as physical territory, but as a cultural and historical space shaped by ancestral ties, colonial histories, and ongoing ecological change. Bringing together perspectives from different geographies, Nelden Djakababa Gericke, Ngurah Suryawan, and Minh Duc Pham will share reflections drawn for artistic practice, research, and lived experience. Their conversations will touch on how memories of land, plants, and food reveal layered histories of migration, colonial encounters, environmental transformation, and cultural resilience.
I Ngurah Suryawan is an anthropologist and lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Papua (UNIPA), Manokwari, West Papua, and in the Department of Politics and Government, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Warmadewa, Bali. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, in 2015. His essay, “Seeking the Morning Star: Young Papuans and the Ongoing Struggle Against Indonesian Colonialism,” was published in the edited volume Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality (ANU Press, 2025). His forthcoming books are Tri Hita Bencana: The Political Economy of Greed in Contemporary Bali and Terlelap Berbalut Luka yang Terus Terjaga.
Nelden Djakababa Gericke is a Berlin-based Indonesian-Filipina fiction writer, crafter, and trained psychologist. With extensive experience in trauma-and-community-work in Indonesia, she was a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. She now designs workshops blending jewelry crafting, psychology, and writing. Working as a freelancer for Tempo Magazine Indonesia, Nelden also contributed to the editorial team of the online magazine Südostasien. In 2025, she was awarded the Literature-Stipend for Writers Writing in Non-German Languages by the City of Berlin.
Phạm Minh Đức is a Berlin-based artist and performer. He studied Exhibition Design and Scenography at the University of Art and Design (HfG) Karlsruhe as well as Performance Studies and Design Theory at the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin. His artistic practice engages between visual and performing arts and explores identity at the intersection of gender, race and class. His works have been exhibited at various institutions such as the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, Stadtmuseum Dresden, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin.
This mini festival takes place across multiple venues in Bali, and are all free entry. Click the link below to register for the public programs and to access the full festival schedule at all venues:
www.goethe.de/indonesia/dealingindistance
PRESS KIT
NEWS
NOW! Bali – “Dealing in Distance” Travelling Mini Festival
KOMPAS.ID – The “Dealing in Distance” Festival Returns to Bali for the Third Time
TEMPO.CO – 30 Karya Seniman Asia Tenggara di Festival Mini Bali
BALEBENGONG.ID – Dealing in Distance: Menjelajahi Diaspora, Migrasi, dan Rasa Kepemilikan