There’s a fantastic phrase in Hindi, jugaad: the on a regular basis artwork of do-it-yourself problem-solving, typically implying a frugal and imaginative retooling of shopper commodities and applied sciences to fulfill customized wants. The spontaneous engineering in, say, putting in a four-seater couch at the back of a rickshaw, or fashioning a multiplug outlet from of a discarded cooking oil bottle, leads to pleasant dialectical photos that talk poetically to the irreverent and extremely idiosyncratic ways in which working-class shoppers make native sense of world commodity streams, significantly by mechanically extending the lifespans of objects (or repurposing their perform fully). Whereas the Indonesian language lacks an identical phrase, artist Bagus Pandega nods approvingly on the time period over a Zoom name from Bandung, and presents ngulik – an intense and studious type of tinkering – as a linguistic ally. For Indonesia isn’t any stranger to the artwork of jugaad, its streets characteristically crammed with mom-and-pop restore outlets and garages that provide all types of savvy, needs-based customization – of motorbikes specifically, Indonesians’ absolute car of alternative. The artist inaugurates me within the native Jamet subculture, a slang abbreviation of Jawa steel or ‘Javanese metalhead’. These grunge-looking, street-styled youths congregate round bike tradition and even stage grandiose drag races the place probably the most structurally modified zombie-bikes take the prize. ‘The bikes they make are extremely speculative objects,’ Pandega feedback. ‘Aesthetics are actually essential.’
Pandega’s engineered environments and modular installations – examples of which have been included within the 2024 Bangkok Artwork Biennale and the 2022 version of documenta – are homages to the fabric ingenuity of Indonesia’s city working class. Typically, these works even take part in it. His forthcoming two-part solo present, realized between Kunsthalle Basel (‘Sumber Alam’) and Swiss Institute (‘Daya Benda’) in New York, will open this autumn, marking his first institutional solo shows exterior of Asia. For the event, he devised a completely operational electrical motorcycle utilizing spare Kawasaki and Suzuki elements, full with customized airbrushed chrome in hues of purple, pink and gold. (The artist soft-launched the bike at a drag race he organized in Cimahi, West Java in June 2025.) Putar Petir Racing Workforce (2025), because the work is formally titled, enhances Hyperpnea Inexperienced (2024), a large-scale set up housing a set of houseplants (Sansevieria), lights (addressable LED pixels) and a few of Indonesia’s most exported commodities comparable to minerals (Garnierite). When on show, the latter art work will react to viewers’s exhales by pumping oxygen into its environment, a self-devised sort of exhibitionary biofeedback.
The bikes they make are extremely speculative objects.
Pandega’s work engages with quotidian cultural practices and artwork historic ones alike. Artwork historical past’s again catalogue sports activities its personal proud lineage of makeshift gadgetry (minus aggressive motorcycle drag exhibits, regrettably). Kinetic artwork, a fixture of the Twentieth-century canon, shares Pandega’s laboratory-style method to sculpture, the place energetic mechanical processes are concocted in entrance of an viewers and introduced as a makeshift mess of {hardware}, screens and cables. The style, which was popularized within the Nineteen Fifties, spatialized an aesthetic vocabulary of mechanical engineering, so typically fully tucked away from the tip person. The hope, for some artists, is that they may attune audiences to an more and more spectacular cybernetic expertise of the current – exactly by emphasizing its improvised, provisional nature. Kinetic artwork can also be distinct for its international family tree, superior equally by Jean Tinguely’s self-destructing automatons in France and New York as a lot as David Medalla’s ephemeral foam machines in Manila. Pandega – who studied sculpture however is an autodidact within the discipline of mechanical engineering – shares these artists’ novice method, rendering the method of prototyping a extremely social one, and the kinetic engagement with the spectator important. ‘A variety of the work lies in making issues work,’ Pandega admits.
But when mid-century kinetic artwork reveled within the trashy (if poetic) spectacle of an more and more cybernetic age, Pandega’s up to date take presents a distinctively materialist subset of considerations – particularly, the worldwide politics of useful resource extraction. Contemplate Anim Wraksa (2025), Outdated Javanese for ‘the spirit of the tree’, which realizes the continual nickel plating of a clove tree department by trapping it inside an acrylic container crammed with an electrolyte resolution. Over the course of the Swiss Institute exhibition, a dwell feed will report and display the gradual realization of the sculpture, calling consideration to its literal supply materials. Indonesia presently sits on the largest nickel reserve on this planet, a mineral that has develop into more and more wanted within the mass manufacturing of batteries for the world’s ‘low carbon’ revolution. Consequently, the nation’s authorities set the bold aim of rating among the many high three producers of electrical car batteries worldwide by 2027 – a plan that includes the huge clearing of rainforest in addition to the repurposing of land previously dedicated to the nation’s golden crop, palm oil. Pandega explored the latter in his 2024 collaboration with artist Kei Imazu, Synthetic Inexperienced by Nature Inexperienced 4.0. This constantly self-generating and self-erasing ink portray is made up of two machines: one which produces a portray primarily based on a drawing, and one other that erases the work in response to biofeedback from a dwelling oil palm tree.
Within the final twenty years, international up to date artwork has seen its share of works about useful resource extraction, however such work tends to give attention to the politics of its manufacturing, not its miscellaneous consumerist endpoints – the ‘social life’ of issues, as postcolonial scholar Arjun Appadurai would name it. For nickel is not only a world commodity however a useful resource with numerous native use values and, by extension, cultural, social and aesthetic implications. In Indonesia’s restore outlets, nature, know-how, artwork and capital are at all times already entangled, which can clarify the native enthusiasm for Pandega’s makeshift installations: like jugaad, they monumentalize systemic conundrums which can be lived and deeply identified. As we talk about his foray into Indonesia’s Jamet tradition, the artist predicts that it’ll finally go electrical, a symptom of one more revolution within the nation’s small urban-industrial and pure panorama. Nonetheless, when Pandega submitted his customized electrical bike to race, it misplaced out to a gasoline counterpart – upon completion of the match, he was kindly suggested to supply a Chinese language battery as an alternative.
Bagus Pandega’s ‘Sumber Alam’ is on view at Kunsthalle Basel from 28 August to fifteen November 2025; ‘Daya Benda’ is on view at Swiss Institute, New York from 30 September 2025 to 4 January 2026
Most important picture: Bagus Pandega in his studio in 2025. Courtesy: the artist and ROH, Jakarta; {photograph}: Maruto Ardi
