Conjunction of Drones gathers practices that move through textile, assemblage, sculpture, and expanded material investigations to consider the drone not merely as a technological apparatus, but as a condition of sustained vibration — a continuous hum that lingers between presence and disappearance.[1] Within the exhibition, the drone operates simultaneously as metaphor, rhythm, and psychic residue: a persistent frequency through which repetition, labor, memory, and material consciousness unfold.
Across the works of A. Sebastianus, Ari Bayuaji, Audya Amalia, Dian Mayang, Jumaadi, Kristoffer Ardeña, Sarita Ibnoe, Widi Pangestu, and Samuel Xun, repetition emerges not as mechanical recurrence, but as a durational and contemplative gesture.[2] Weaving, binding, stitching, layering, carving, and accumulating become temporal acts through which the artists negotiate vulnerability, displacement, ecological precarity, and embodied remembrance. The works occupy a threshold where intention meets surrender, allowing material to resist fixity and instead reveal its own rhythms of tension, erosion, and transformation.
Often associated with surveillance, intrusion, and detached observation, the drone is reconfigured here as something intimate and unstable — a liminal state between witnessing and inhabiting, control and dissolution.[3] The exhibition proposes vulnerability as a generative condition: an opening through which material, memory, and affect circulate beyond singular authorship. In this space, making becomes less an act of mastery than one of attunement and listening.
Foregrounding fibers, organic matter, vernacular processes, and tactile materiality, the exhibition reflects on how materials themselves carry sedimented histories and living cosmologies.[4] Thread, wood, earth, pigment, and found remnants operate as mnemonic surfaces, holding traces of ancestral knowledge, migration, ritual, and ecological entanglement. Traditional techniques are neither nostalgically preserved nor passively inherited; instead, they are continuously reactivated, fractured, and reimagined in response to contemporary urgencies surrounding identity, extraction, and environmental instability.
Rather than arriving at a singular narrative, Conjunction of Drones unfolds as a field of resonances — sustained frequencies that move between the intimate and collective, the bodily and atmospheric, the remembered and speculative. Like a drone that persists through duration rather than resolution, the exhibition lingers in states of becoming, where materials function as living archives continuously woven, unraveled, and reconstituted across time.
Footnotes
[1] The notion of the “drone” as sustained sonic or psychic duration draws from minimalist music traditions and sound theory, particularly the writings of La Monte Young and Brian Eno, where continuity and repetition generate altered states of perception and temporality.
[2] The understanding of repetition as embodied and ritualistic gesture resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), in which repetition produces transformation rather than sameness.
[3] The tension between observation, surveillance, and embodiment echoes discussions found in Paul Virilio’s writings on vision machines and technological perception, particularly regarding the collapsing boundary between observer and participant.
[4] The exhibition’s engagement with material memory and vernacular knowledge relates to discourses in material culture and anthropology, including the writings of Tim Ingold, who positions making as a process of correspondence between bodies, materials, and environments.