At the night market, you can buy fake Rolex watches, fried grasshoppers, and amulets with “magical” powers. Skinny guys with tattoos operate carnival rides that definitely aren’t safe. There’s a haunted house and a giant python. Gangsters, pickpockets and revolutionaries lurk in the shadows. In this exhibition, fifteen leading contemporary artists make works that evoke the transgressive allure of the Indonesian night market. The morning market is for groceries and gossip, but the night market is the world reversed; where our repressed fears and desires are set loose. Many of the works in this exhibition draw from mysticism, mythology and ritual, conjuring an uncomfortable strangeness. But there’s more to these works than the cheap thrills of a carnival; these works invite us to consider the shadow worlds that exist in every community. For some that’s about revealing stories that have been hidden from the national narrative; for others it means charting the dark terrain of our inner, psychological worlds.

Krack Studio is a printmaking collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, with Indonesian and Australian members. Established in 2013, Krack works collaboratively with artists to produce print-based works that are visually innovative and respond critically to cultural issues in the Asia Pacific region. For more than thirteen years, Krack has produced exhibitions, editioned works, hosted residencies and built friendships with emerging and established artists from Indonesia, Australia and the rest of the world.

For this exhibition, Krack invited fifteen of their favourite artists to make a work in our studio responding to the theme of “Pasar Malam”. Some of these artists have a background in printmaking, but many of them come from other disciplines; painting, photography, street art, performance or documentary. The artists worked collaboratively with Krack’s printmakers; Rudi Hermawan, Alfin Agnuba and Malcolm Smith. The works in the Pasar Malam exhibition are very large; each approximately 1.5m x 2m, screenprinted on 100% cotton paper, requiring extra-large equipment Krack made especially for this exhibition, and a dedicated workspace. The artists started with an original sketch or photograph which was then sent back and forth with the printing team via messaging apps; enlarging the scale, simplifying the design, separating layers of colors, making screens and mixing inks until finally the images were ready to print. Most of the artists were able to attend the editioning process in Yogyakarta, the rest joined in via video calls. This is a way of working that Krack has refined over more than a decade of editioning works with contemporary artists.

The Pasar Malam exhibition is designed to tour to cities and towns across Indonesia and Australia, similar to an actual Pasar Malam. The works are printed on paper and unframed so they all fit in a single box, making it simple to transport from city to city. Even the 3D works are able to fold up and fit into the touring crate. Krack has partnered with 16albermarle Project Space to coordinate this tour. Established in 2019, 16albermarle connects Australian audiences to southeast Asia through contemporary art, encouraging their deeper engagement with the region. As well as presenting southeast Asian in an intimate space in inner-city Sydney, they also stage art study tours, attends art fairs, run educational programs and arrange residencies.

Night Markets

There are night markets everywhere in southeast Asia. In Java, the most common type is a carnival that travels from town to town, with amusements like ferris wheels, carousels, a haunted house and a “Tong Setan”. You can also buy sugary snacks, second-hand clothes and cheap accessories at these markets. The annual “Sekaten” in Jogja, is a huge Night Market sponsored by the Sultan to celebrate the birthday of the Prophet. Prihatmoko Moki’s work “Sakati” looks at the Islamic roots of the Sekaten festival in Yogyakarta, but the images also references Hindu and Buddhist and Kejawin icons – suggesting the complicated and overlapping histories that underscore this event. Restu Ratnaningtyas, Ida Lawrence and Tobias Richardson have made works about carnival attractions you can still ride at the Pasar Malam today; the Tong Setan, Biyanglala and Rumah Hantu, respectively. Amina McConvell’s abstract, non-objective image in this exhibition evokes the chaos and excitement of these unique attractions.

But these are not the only markets at night in Java. As night falls, in the city parks, vendors pushing carts called “grobak” serve tea and small snacks to visitors who sit on woven mats. Rizqi Maulana’s image depicts the elegant simplicity of “wedangan”; drinking sweet tea in the evening. Each grobak might have its own regulars; teenage girls, or giggling groups of gay men, or young couples on dates, or becak drivers on a dinner break. While they drink and gossip, transgender performers wander from group to group, lip-syncing to bawdy songs from a ghetto blaster. They are paid a few cents for their efforts.

Other evening markets appear in carparks and along dusty streets, called “Pasar Kilithikan” (flea markets) or “Pasar Senthir” (lamp markets) that sell second-hand, counterfeit or stolen goods. In preparation for this exhibition Ipeh Nur visited these kinds of markets in Yogyakarta, taking photographs and making a series of preliminary sketches before producing her final image. These markets are a crowded jumble of junk that promise a treasure hidden deep within for those who have the persistence to hunt for them, and the tenacity to negotiate a reasonable price with the vendors.

Some night markets around Indonesia have a mystical and slightly sinister edge. Enkah Nkomr’s work represents a night market south of Yogyakarta, at Parangkusumo beach, where you can buy magic potions and objects to improve your love and/or sex life, but the market is better known for the sex workers in the shadows at its edge. There are other kinds of spooky markets around Java; near Purwokerto you can visit a small night market where, on the full moon before Ramadan, young men immerse themselves in the river to gain everlasting youth. There are various myths about “Pasar Setan” (satanic markets) at night on the slopes of volcanoes around Java; if you hear voices calling to you, throw them a few coins and run!

When we originally conceived this exhibition, we did not intend for it to be specifically about Indonesian “Pasar Malam”. Rather we chose that title because we wanted to work with artists whose work often talked about with the dark side of our communities. We gave each artist 3 – 6 months to think about their image before we began the process of production. Some decided to respond directly to the theme, visiting night markets and creating images from what they saw there. Others responded more indirectly to the theme; evoking the shadow worlds that exist in every community.

T A Kusno’s work references the black market for tiger pelts in Java and Sumatra. But this image is part of a broader project where he casts a critical eye at how the now extinct Javanese tiger was a symbol of virility and masculinity during the colonial era. Tamarra describes their image as a “Rajah”; A kind of spell that can be bought from certain night markets. The spell is usually written on a piece of fabric that the buyer lies to their belt or to a chain around their neck. Rudi Hermawan’s work refers to sellers of jimat – objects that are said to possess magical powers for the wearer, and that traditionally were bought on auspicious dates at specific markets. These days you can order them online.

For some artists, the night market represents the spaces where transgression and pleasure are tolerated, even encouraged. Where the productive concerns of daily life are abandoned in favor of sex, danger and hedonism. For these artists the night market is about the things that exist beyond logic and science; like mysticism, ritual, and the supernatural. It’s also a place for those who exist beyond the normative boundaries of society; clairvoyants, fugitives, freaks and those who embrace the dark glamour of “otherness”. Malcolm Smith’s work depicts his version of the “Torments of Hell” in Indonesian, “Siksa Neraka”) His work responds to Hell-themed parks like the Haw Par Villa in Singapore, or Wang Saen Suk in Bangkok. In this region it is possible to find Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist and Christian depictions of Hell that play on our darkest fears and border on the sensational.

For other artists, the night market refers to the hidden secrets and dark histories that underscore every community throughout history. Jumaadi’simage refers to a poem by Chairul, about a soldier doing nightwatch in the 1940s while fighting against the colonial government; ambivalent about what the future might bring. Alfin Aguba’s work describes sites of a series of murders in Jogjakarta in the 1980’s that today are bus stops. Leyla Stevensimage is from her short documentary “Witness”. It depicts a banyan tree that looks over a marketplace where people were murdered during the brutal communist purges in 1965. While we can build over these places, their stories continue to haunt us.

At the night market, the normative rules that govern our lives are abandoned in favor of transgression and pleasure, mysticism and otherness. But what this exhibition explores is how these kinds of spaces are not simply an indulgence or a folly; rather they play an important role as the outlet through which a community’s repressed fears and desires can be released. This exhibition invokes the spectre of what Freud called “the return of the repressed”; the things we deny or repress or fail to address can return to haunt us in more destructive ways.