5 Questions with Leyla Stevens
Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist who works within a lens-based practice.
Her work has made a significant contribution to expanded documentary genres in Australian video art, as well as exploring the reparative potential of artmaking framed within political and social justice issues. Her practice is informed by ongoing engagements with storied places, archives, cultural geographies and performance lineages through a transcultural lens. As a research-led artist, she is guided by collaborative engagements with place and communities, and her interest lies in the recuperation of counter histories within dominant narratives.
Leyla has been the recipient of multiple arts grants for the development of new work and has been a finalist in major art awards including John Fries (2018) and NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship (2014, 2018). Her works are held in significant collections including Museum of Contemporary Art, AGNSW and Kadist. She works collaboratively as a member of Woven Kolektif, an artist group exploring diasporic connections to Indonesia.
(Still from PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest / supplied)
No.1
PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest is the title of your new show, where “pahit manis” means “bittersweet” in Bahasa Indonesia. How was it conceived, and how do you think it sits next to your body of work so far?
PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest was first conceived as a response to a collection of Balinese ink paintings from the 1930s. They were made from an emerging generation of artists from Batuan and Sanur and originally commissioned by the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. The collection, which features over 1000 works on paper by around 80 artisans, is now housed within various public and private collections, primarily in the US and Australia.
Little known beyond scholarly and art history circles, the paintings hold a long history of being tucked away in niche corners of archival collections. I first came across some of these paintings deep in the collection warehouse at the Australian Museum. PAHIT MANIS emerged from my ongoing research interest in the diasporic condition of Balinese artefacts and archives as they migrate around the world through colonial collection practices. It was really this chance encounter that led me to these paintings, as I was researching a completely different collection at the time. I remember this moment of seeing these paintings being pulled out from a drawer and being really affected by encountering these vital Balinese ancestral lineages and histories. The follow-on reaction was to question how these paintings ended up in this drawer, and why they are so physically removed from those who would benefit the most from seeing them, most particularly the artists’ living descendants, many who continue to paint today in Batuan.
The presence of these paintings in a collection storage in Sydney, really speaks to the heart of the colonial project and its ongoing effects, where Balinese cultural histories continue to be written and remembered through western scholarship. The starting point for PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest was to think through in the absence of being able to repatriate these paintings, what are some other ways to ‘return’ or how to connect these paintings with audiences again outside of the collection space—and that was where the idea of making an animation from the paintings started from.
No.2
Alongside a four-channel video, you also exhibit some pen-and-ink drawings by Sanur artists loaned from the Australian Museum, part of a larger body of work produced in Batuan and Sanur and mostly commissioned by North American and English anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the 1930s. How do you think the mediums speak to one another?
In exhibiting some of the original paintings from the Mead and Bateson collection, I wanted to show that the images you see in the digital animation have a material weight and presence in the world. To view the animation alongside the physical paintings, the hope was to present an exhibition that is both historical and contemporary.
And because the film is engaging with cultural material that is not my own, and which belong to the families of Batuan, it was important to acknowledge the names of all the artists whose works feature in the film as part of the exhibition design, and to show the level of collaborative undertakings that made this project possible. One day I hope to see the reverse of this show, where a big retrospective of Batuan paintings is exhibited in a major museum, with my film as a small appendix to the show.
No.3
In 2021 you won the prestigious Blake Art Prize for your film Kidung which looks at the history of political violence in Bali, in response to an acknowledged mass grave site from Indonesia’s 1965-66 genocide. How do you build structure and form to your work when the topic is so heavy, and as a result might lead to unpredictable outcomes during shooting?
It is a good question. On the one hand the memory of the 1965-6 genocide in Indonesia continues to be surrounded by politicised amnesia in mainstream or state-sanctioned discourse. On the other hand, within certain artistic and intellectual circles, I get the feeling at times that there is a kind of memory fatigue around 1965 as a topic—perhaps because reparative justice remains elusive, and we continue to be stuck in a cycle of remembering and forgetting.
Looking back now at Kidung, I can say that I wanted to make a work that spoke to a Balinese perspective of 1965 and that acts as a form of memorialisation for the missing dead that continue to lie buried and unacknowledged on the island. Before I shot Kidung, a lot of my films were made in very iterative processes of remixing different imagery from different shoots I had done, and building narratives from existing images. But with Kidung I had this very clear image of Bu Cok singing a lament against the banyan tree where a mass grave from 1965 lies and that this needed to be something staged for the camera. I was so lucky and privileged to work with the now late Cok Sawitri—she was such a powerful artist and performer. In the film, she is singing in a classical poetry style known as ‘kidung’, hence the film’s title. Her voice is able to convey all this emotion, and one of my early decisions when editing was not to include subtitles for English-speaking audiences, but to focus all the attention on her performance.
This is a roundabout way to answer the question on how I build structure and form when working with a heavy topic. My instinctive approach is to find my way to the subject indirectly rather than head-on. I find that all the things I want to draw attention to are already there in the frame; I just need to slow things down and let the audience pay attention to what is not always immediately visible. In Kidung for example, we see all these long slow shots of a banyan tree, that if we look closer is also a guardian and a witness to the missing dead that lie beneath the surface.
No.4
In a write-up about PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest in Art Guide Australia, you said [about the paintings]: “The argument is that we expand the life of these objects by putting them in conditions so that they cannot age, but by doing so, they become dead objects, totally divorced from the original context and from the communities that would know how to engage with them and understand them.” What does it mean to “resurrect” old art within a contemporary context?
Many of my recent works look to understand traditional dance, song or images as inherently contemporary art forms. Traditional lineages in Bali are often been understood through a religious or cultural framework, as if they are somehow outside of history. But when we look closely at these forms, they were also changing and adapting to the times and reflect on political and economic realities.
The animations in PAHIT MANIS are mostly depictions of the Tantri narrative—short stories with often an animal protagonist and designed to teach a moral lesson about the excess of greed or hubris. Tantri is the name of the woman who is narrating, and she is reciting these stories to a King on the night of their wedding—it is Indonesia’s version of A Thousand and One Nights. In the film, Tantri is played by a dalang (shadow puppet master), one of Bali’s oldest storytelling traditions, and she’s singing a contemporary story about about Bali’s current loss of forests and pollution of rivers. Another way the animation speaks to a contemporary context is that the sound design is drawn from sound recordings in one of Bali’s last remaining old growth forests. For me, the Tantri tales were able to reflect on Bali’s current environmental devastation, as they speak to the interconnectedness of different species and actions, and the dangers of when things are out of balance. The idea was to not only ‘resurrect’ the 1930s Batuan paintings simply by turning them into an animation, but also to connect and show these stories within a continuum that links the past to the present.
No.5
What do you do in-between projects? How do you deal with your version of a blank page? Are there any reliable sources of new curiosities?
There are always unfinished questions and ideas from each project that carry on into the next. For instance, I’m currently working with the forest recordings that I made for PAHIT MANIS and thinking through the early stages of a new sound installation.
With each new project, there is a kind of challenge to myself to make something that feels like a shift from the last work. So, to think about making a work that isn’t film-based feels both exciting and daunting. I don’t think I have a version of the blank page; it’s more a problem of too many ideas and not enough time. But there is a limit in my capacity to create one big project after another. I find it important to have a period of downtime in the studio between projects. To be kind of aimless and spend time reading or drawing—things that form a baseline for the bigger ideas to grow.
(Leyla Stevens / credit: Dodik Cahyendra)
Find out more
PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest by Australian–Balinese artist Leyla Stevens considers how stories and philosophies from the Indonesian island of Bali can guide conservation efforts. Pahit manis means ‘bittersweet’ in Bahasa Indonesia, suggesting that these are stories of both hope and lament at a time when our environment is under threat.
This exhibition looks to storytelling traditions that can promote care for the natural and spirit worlds, including wayang kulit, a form of shadow puppet theatre, and Tantri tales, traditional fables that often feature animal protagonists. In particular, it references a group of pen-and-ink works on paper made in the villages of Batuan and Sanur during the 1930s – Bali’s late colonial period.
Four of these works are presented in the exhibition space while others are brought to life in a meditative new film by Stevens that combines animation, performance and contemporary painting documentation, with a soundtrack of field recordings from one of Bali’s last old-growth forests. The result is a captivating experience that invites you to consider Bali’s past, present and future anew.
Co-curated by Artspace and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the exhibition is part of the Contemporary Projects series at the Art Gallery.
The exhibition runs from 2 November 2024 to 16 February 2025, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. More information here.