Dewi, the word for goddess in Indonesian and Malay, is borrowed from the Hindu devi, which means a being of excellence and exalted beauty. Yet Dewi is also one of the most common names for a woman in the Malay Archipelago. By making it the title of her solo exhibition, artist Nadiah Bamadhaj evokes a sense of commonality between the human and the divine. Her works blend a fascination with aesthetics and a sensibility for the particular sublime of douleur exquise. In Lanang Pijar, 2023, a featureless, horned face made of patinated cast brass in a robin’s-egg blue tone looms high above eye level. Suspended beneath it is a droplet-shaped resin womb covered unevenly in goat hide and internally lit. For The Harvest, 2023, a metal hook attached to a buffalo-hide heart supports a tapering cluster of navy-blue, silver-streaked testes, from which delicate metal rods sprout forth like mycelium. In addition to her wide range of materials, Bamadhaj exposes usually hidden hooks and wires as formal elements that speak to a femme psyche perched precariously between the divine and the mundane, the exquisite and the desperate, the fractured and the whole.
Intersecting with Bamadhaj’s vertically hung sculptures are her diaristic charcoal studies of horizontal landscapes. She populates the blurred, penumbral realms with abstract yet corporeal shapes set off by sinuous trails of gold leaf. The drawings on paper collage are then carefully positioned in dialogue with the shadows of the hanging objects, transforming the exhibition into an experimental mélange of material symbiosis.