Artist Talk with Ade Darmawan & Philippe Pirotte (EN)
Artist and curator Ade Darmawan joins professor Philippe Pirotte in conversation, moderated by WIELS curator Helena Kritis, to discuss his work in the exhibition Magical Realism. Through delicate distillation processes, Darmawan's practice meditates on transformation, decay, and the invisible forces that shape historical memory. In this conversation, they will explore how material processes become tools for questioning dominant narratives and power structures. This conversation invites us to reflect on how the slow work of erosion, both symbolic and real, can offer paths to resistance and renewal.
Ade Darmawan lives and works in Jakarta as an artist and curator. He is a co-founder and member of ruangrupa. He studied at the Indonesia Art Institute (ISI). In 1998, he attended a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Darmawan researches the practice of distillation as a visual analogy for the multiple histories of extraction in colonial Indonesia, which continue to reverberate in attitudes towards nature and art making in the present. His exhibitions include Doing Business with the Dutch, Lumen Travo Gallery, Amsterdam (2018), and Magic Centre, Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven (2016), and Portikus, Frankfurt (2015). He participated in the Gwangju Biennale (2016) and the Singapore Biennale (2016). In 2024, he presented his solo exhibition Water Resistance at ROH, Jakarta, and Cemeti, Yogyakarta. As a curator, he has contributed to Negotiating the Future: 6 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan (2017). He was the executive director of the Jakarta Biennale (2013–7) and the artistic director of the Jakarta Biennale (2009). Together with ruangrupa, he curated SONSBEEK ’16: transACTION (2016), and for Documenta 15 in Kassel (2022), ruangrupa was appointed as the artistic director.
Philippe Pirotte is a curator and educator based in Brussels, Belgium. He was co-artistic director (with Vera Mey) of Busan Biennale 2024 and is an art history professor at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He served on the Documenta Commission, which selected ruangrupa as the artistic direction of documenta fifteen. He curated the survey exhibition of performance artist Melati Suryodarmo at Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht (2022) and the group exhibition Arus Balik. From Below the Wind to Above the Wind and Back Again for the Center for Contemporary Art Singapore (2019). He was a member of the curatorial team of the Jakarta Biennale in 2017 and was artistic director of the 2016 edition of La Biennale de Montréal, Canada.
On the same day, the lecture-performance Fireflies Conversations by Elizabeth Povinelli & Federico Campagna at Beursschouwburg in the frame of Kunstenfestivaldesarts. We invite you to attend both events for a richer engagement with the themes of Magical Realism.