Leyla Stevens
PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest

Leyla Stevens is the first artist to be selected for a new ongoing, annual co-commission between the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Artspace. The partnership supports an artist or collective from Artspace's One Year Studio Program to develop a new work for presentation at the Art Gallery, as part of the new Contemporary Projects series, in collaboration with curators from both institutions.

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.