“You might think a total eclipse of the sun would have no color…”
Anne Carson writes in The Color of Eclipse. What appears as absence does not remain empty but reverses, producing a condition in which perception itself becomes unstable. This exhibition does not take the eclipse as its subject, but as a condition: one does not simply see less, but differently. What emerges is a field of liminal matter — material that neither settles into objecthood nor dissolves into absence, but remains suspended within the instability of appearance.
Across the exhibition, the artists approach materials not as passive substances but as active interlocutors. Works emerge through responsiveness to the capacities, resistances, and behaviors of matter itself. In contrast to Aristotelian hylomorphism, where form is imposed onto passive material, matter here possesses agency and participates in the becoming of the work. Presence therefore is not treated as fixed or complete, but as something continuously produced and withdrawn at the same time.
This condition extends into a broader metaphysical inquiry into how things come into presence without ever fully arriving. Martin Heidegger’s notion of Anwesen — presencing as continual emergence — resonates with A. Sebastianus’ engagement with the Javanese concept of Sangkan Paraning Dumadi, the origin and destiny of being. Within this framework, memory is not retrieved as image, but materially produced. His process moves from photograph to data, from data to thread, and from thread to textile. Through spinning and weaving, fragmented images are transformed into tensile structures that preserve duration rather than representation. The works do not reconstruct memory but re-materialize it through labor, repetition, and material strain.
This logic persists throughout Sebastianus’ installations, where forms remain suspended between collapse and formation. The sculptures oscillate between heaviness and lift, structure and dispersion, holding matter at the threshold of dissolution without allowing it to disappear. Resonating with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the installations do not simply present objects to be seen, but expose the instability through which seeing itself occurs.
Chiara Hardy extends this inquiry through systems of transmission, attenuation, and spatial tension. Using fishing rods, light, shadow, and suspended forms, Hardy constructs environments where perception becomes probabilistic and incomplete. Her materials operate less as symbolic objects than as responsive instruments registering invisible forces and delayed transmissions. Signals, smoke, reflections, and tensions move through space without guarantee of arrival, producing forms that remain contingent, deferred, and perpetually in flux.
Similarly, Chintia Kirana approaches material through cycles of residue, combustion, and reconstitution. Working with ash, joss paper remains, and carbon gathered from lived environments, her practice investigates memory as something structurally unstable yet materially persistent. Heat, pressure, layering, and accumulation inscribe duration directly into the work, where surfaces oscillate between coherence and fragmentation. What emerges is not representation, but the material persistence of histories that resist consolidation.
Across the exhibition, presence never appears as stable completion. It emerges instead through tension, delay, residue, and continual transformation. Matter does not simply occupy space; it negotiates its own appearance. The exhibition ultimately asks: if presence only emerges through continual negotiation with disappearance, what are we encountering when we insist something is here?