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Dewi, the phrase for goddess in Indonesian and Malay, is borrowed from the Hindu devi, which implies a being of excellence and exalted magnificence. But Dewi can also be one of the frequent names for a lady within the Malay Archipelago. By making it the title of her solo exhibition, artist Nadiah Bamadhaj evokes a way of commonality between the human and the divine. Her works mix a fascination with aesthetics and a sensibility for the actual chic of douleur exquise. In Lanang Pijar, 2023, a featureless, horned face fabricated from patinated solid brass in a robin’s-egg blue tone looms excessive above eye stage. Suspended beneath it’s a droplet-shaped resin womb lined erratically in goat disguise and internally lit. For The Harvest, 2023, a metallic hook hooked up to a buffalo-hide coronary heart helps a tapering cluster of navy-blue, silver-streaked testes, from which delicate metallic rods sprout forth like mycelium. Along with her big selection of supplies, Bamadhaj exposes normally hidden hooks and wires as formal components that talk to a femme psyche perched precariously between the divine and the mundane, the beautiful and the determined, the fractured and the entire.
Intersecting with Bamadhaj’s vertically hung sculptures are her diaristic charcoal research of horizontal landscapes. She populates the blurred, penumbral realms with summary but corporeal shapes set off by sinuous trails of gold leaf. The drawings on paper collage are then rigorously positioned in dialogue with the shadows of the hanging objects, remodeling the exhibition into an experimental mélange of fabric symbiosis.
— Hung Duong
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