Biennale Jogja 18 – KAWRUH: Land of Rooted Practices

Jogja Biennale 2025: KAWRUH: Land of Rooted Practices,
Part I: September 19–24, 2025 — Karangsewu Village, Kulon Progo
Part II: October 5–November 20, 2025 — Yogyakarta Region, Indonesia

Biennale Jogja returns in 2025 with its 18th edition titled KAWRUH: Land of Rooted Practices, curated by Bob Edrian (Indonesia), Eva Lin (Taiwan), and the Yogyakarta-based youth collective ketjilbergerak. Anchored in the ongoing Equator Series – Second Cycle, this edition deepens its engagement with the themes of translocality and transhistoricity, furthering the biennale’s long-standing commitment to South-South solidarity and grounded knowledge.

“Kawruh,” derived from the Javanese language, signifies knowledge as the result of accumulated experience critically examined through reason and intellect. In this spirit, the curators frame the 2025 edition as a constellation of artistic and community-rooted practices that foreground embodied knowledge, local wisdom, and resistance to epistemic erasure. KAWRUH is understood as both a reflection and a ripple of values that illuminate the timeline of knowledge development and the collective traditions of the people. The curatorial premise positions art not only as a mode of representation but as a way of being in dialogue with land, cosmology, history, and myth.

Biennale Jogja 18 will take form in two parts: the first, from September 19 to 24 in Padukuhan Boro, Karangsewu Village, focuses on rural life and community engagement. The second, running October 5 to November 20, will take place across several locations in the Yogyakarta area, including Bangunjiwo and Panggungharjo Villages. Together, they create a context for learning, transmission, and encounter that resists dominant narratives of knowledge production.

Fifty artists from Indonesia and other countries across the Global South will participate, strengthening the Biennale’s commitment to forms of resistance and solidarity outside the Global North framework.

Curatorial Team:

Bob Edrian (Indonesia) is an independent curator with a focus on the development of sound in the arts and media art. He was awarded the 2016 Curatorial Research Grant funded by Selasar Sunaryo Art Space and the Sidharta Aboejono Martoredjo (SAM) Fund for Arts and Ecology. In 2018, he participated in the Para Site Workshops for Emerging Art Professionals in Hong Kong and more recently in CULTIVATE: Professional Development for Curators and Art Managers by in-tangible institute in Bangkok (2024). His writing was featured in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (2020), and in 2022 he was included in Apollo Magazine’s “40 Under 40 Asia Pacific.”

IHwa Eva Lin (Taiwan) is an independent curator known for off-site curatorial projects in unconventional venues such as abandoned factories, military bunkers, temples, historic mines, and indigenous communities. She works closely with local communities and interdisciplinary collaborators. Her projects include Sleepless in Stone (2024 Taipower Art Festival), From Nowhere to Now Here (2023 Romantic Route 3 Art Festival), You and I live on different planets (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2022, co-curated with Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard-Terrin), Taipei Biennial 2020-2021 (public program curator), and Matsu Biennial 2022 – Underground Matters. She currently serves as the art director of mt.project.

ketjilbergerak is an open, interdisciplinary group initiated by Greg Andi Sindana and Invani Lela Herliana in 2006. Originally working through zines, they later evolved into a youth community focused on contextual education and participatory arts. Since 2016, they have facilitated intergenerational, dialogic learning programs with young people from villages to strengthen environmental awareness and cultural memory through the method of ngelmu iku kelakone kanthi laku (“knowledge must be practiced until it becomes behavior”). In 2017, ketjilbergerak won the “Best Community Movement in Indonesia” award from Kompasiana.

Biennale Jogja 18 is organized by the Biennale Jogja Foundation with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Indonesia, the Indonesian Cultural Endowment Fund (2024), the Cultural Department of the Yogyakarta Special Region Government, and the Yogyakarta Art Center.

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