An easy trap to fall into when it comes to single-artist retrospective exhibitions is reducing interpretation of the artworks to a reflection of the artist’s biography. However, biography is unavoidable in the case of the late Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih’s (1966–2006) exhibition at Gajah Gallery, which offered a painfully intimate cross-section of what it meant to be both female and powerless during her lifetime.

The presentation grappled with the haunting traumas dealt to Murni: she was raped by her father as a young girl and kept silent about it until her late 30s. And from as young as ten, she endured demanding physical labor as a domestic worker. In spite of the sober reality of these bodily traumas, Murni’s art traffics in sensual, albeit grotesque, fantasies: “I never begin with a concept or a pattern, except for the shards of my dreams that remain in my consciousness.” Positioned near the gallery’s entrance, the painting Don’t Let It Happen to Me Again (2001) is strangely tragicomic in the way it alludes to Murni’s past rape in the title, yet portrays a quirky alien-like female that would not look out of place in a Monsters, Inc. film. With her head coldly sliced out of the frame, this female form in teasing lingerie is exposed to the voyeuristic violence of the (male) gaze, countered only by that of a single eye staring out unnervingly from her waist. Thin lines feathering out from this eye evoke the form of a parasitic creature, alive with a frisson of dangerous energy that feeds off this (male) gaze, again throwing into question the gendered stereotype of the woman as passive, fetishized site of desire.

The sardonic domesticity of the gallery’s interior deftly channelled Murni’s own black humor. There was a kind of absurdity in the way inoffensive coffee tables, leather chairs, and glossy art books were strewn around in a gallery space populated by darkly provocative paintings of body parts impaled on phalluses and sharp objects. 

Questions of female agency and identity persisted throughout the show. Murni’s inability to bear children proved a bitter source of tension between her and her husband, ultimately leading to their divorce. In her soft sculpture Thumb (undated), the abstracted image of the pregnant woman is a dreamlike incarnation and can be read as a possible surrogate figure, tapping into Murni’s yearning for children. But although Thumb acts out all the fecund warmth of a pregnant woman with the tactile bumps, swells, and creases from its cotton stuffing, one is repulsed by the black stitches scarring its scalded pink flesh. These layers of repurposed skin sadly open up another space of conversation: society’s treatment of barren women as “damaged goods.” Indeed, Murni’s husband desired to take a second wife to bear him children—a wish she rejected. One can only take heart in how Murni defiantly scrawled her signature across the sculpture, staking ownership over it. Perhaps the stitches are suggestive of a female body taken apart, only to be remade in Murni’s image.

Untitled (c. 2005–06) proved to be Murni’s swan song, as around one month after it was finished she passed away from ovarian cancer. Completed under an ailing Murni’s detailed orders by a Balinese blacksmith, this series of humanoid iron sculptures occupied the gallery’s center with a totemic charge. Echoing her disease and lifetime struggles, aggressive objects like knives, scissors, phalluses, and parasites invade their surfaces.

Yet, one cannot help but feel that in primarily defining the exhibition’s rationale and layout through Murni’s biography, its curators missed out on chance to cast her artworks in a contemporary light: Untitled’s gender-amorphous qualities as a queer challenge to gender binaries, or other works as intimately bound up with social movements against sexual abuse, such as #MeToo. These urgent matters likely would have chimed with an artist who continually defied the sanitized status quo and those who took offense at her work. “I just laughed at them,” said Murni. “In my opinion, if my paintings happen to touch on so-called taboo subjects, why should I be ashamed?”

SUBSCRIBE NOW to receive ArtAsiaPacific’s print editions, including the current issue with this article, for only USD 100 a year or USD 185 for two years.  

ORDER the print edition of the Nov/Dec 2021 issue, in which this article is printed, for USD 21.