Alchemies of the Mundane: Bali’s Nonfrasa Gallery Finds the Sacred in the Everyday

In many ways, Common Beauty III: The Poetry of Patches, presented by Nonfrasa Gallery and curated by Gatari Surya Kusuma, reminded me of the Tunggul Besi Temple. Imagine a Balinese temple atop the foothills of a sacred volcano, believed to be the abode of the gods—Mount Agung. The temple has no walls, no grandiose architecture—just two sacred shrines representing a mother and a father. Tunggul Besi’s worshippers share a relationship with the site: that of a parent and a child, the creator and the created. In all of emptiness, one is whole—thus, there is no need for ornamental substantiation of value because the spiritual value is palpable and felt.

Kusuma has written that in curating the show, she was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In the essay, Le Guin proposes that rather than focusing on swords and spears—symbols of conquest and hero-worship—storytelling might instead centre on vessels and carriers. It is not the killing, conquering, or imperialising that makes a story heroic, but the acts of embracing, nurturing, and simply being. Ultimately, a story is a vessel.

Common Beauty III interpreted this vessel in a plethora of micronarratives. Like the Tunggul Besi, there is no centring of any solitary subject matter—in fact, there is no arc, no throughline, no justification; nor were those warranted. The Shape of Forgotten Light (2024) by Galih Adika strings fragmented superstitions, memories, and sentences into artificial branches. “Don’t look in the mirror at night”, “don’t build a house on skewer sticks”, “don’t wear a green shirt…”, among other Bahasa Indonesian phrases, were inscribed upon such branches, which happen to also reflect back at the viewer. Adika conjured a microcosm of the social fabric, straining and placating its very iota—cultural and spiritual memory—in a nonlinear manner.

Euphoria (2018) by Nyoman Arisana is a recursion of the Batuan art of Bali, which originated from the Batuan village, near the island’s cultural and spiritual heart: Ubud. Batuan art is known for its interlaced macabre, which Arisana depicted through a two-fold meaning. The sprawling macabre of misfortunes is inherently fading and fraying. The mixed media alludes to Nabokovian and Scheherazadian means of storytelling—the unreliable narrator. Arisana is perhaps most honest in terms of confronting cultural narratives topologically. Narratives, whether unwittingly or wittingly, are inherently unreliable. An empirical narrative is one often left unspoken.

Kusuma positioned Euphoria beautifully adjacent to St. Cecilia Infirmary Blues 1 (2025) by Nani Wijaya, which explores the martyr and patron saint of music. The saint, here, is not a passive subject but a grieving, mourning agent. The natural indigo dye, limestone paste, and acrylic on Wijaya’s unprimed canvas are pious. The nature of Bali is godly, and therefore, for the artist to paint with nature—albeit interceded with industrial hints—is an act of meditation in itself. It is akin to the Balinese practice of Tri Hita Karana on rice fields and temple grounds in the face of the island’s neocolonial overtourism. It is resistance through steadfastness. The divine feminine, according to Wijaya, lies in an infirmary—whether Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, or Agama Hindu Dharma. This stringent hospitalisation, doctoring, and nursing, which is maternal, is nothing new. The maternal requires healing, but is healing possible if the body is chronically extracted? Becoming Algae (2023) by Talisa Dwiyani, which displays a mobile of rice paper-like algae, and Wildflower (2025) by Lintang Diani, which coheres acrylic strokes on canvas into flora, are iconographies of the same matriated vessel.

The Flumutationes series (2023) by Rega Ayundya conveys evolution, adaptation, and survival through acrylic ink illustrations of fish and amphibians transiting through the exhibition walls into their respective aquariums. The omission of survival pressures is most omnipotent. Similarly, Allure (Pesona) (2025) by Chiara Hardy is reminiscent of situationism that engulfs the exhibition whole. Two low-tech telephones, separated by glass, were assembled from everyday objects, entangled with invasive vines in Hardy’s Allure. Perhaps the metal scraps and wires are not the only everyday objects in Common Beauty III—perhaps it is also the art on the walls and installations that hang from the ceilings.

The Balinese relationship with God, nature, and people cannot possibly be contained in a single temple, water cleansing ceremony, or spiritual offering. The everyday beauty is the relationship, much like an unwalled temple that requires a pilgrimage of sorts in the form of an uphill walk among the edelweiss (kasna). Nonfrasa’s Common Beauty III is true to Bali—rooted in its people, its materials, and its spirit—capturing a quiet, transient existence where the mundane becomes alchemic.



Common Beauty III: The Poetry of Patches is on view at Titik Dua Ubud, Bali until 15th July 2025.



Feature image: Chiara Hardy. Installation view, Common Beauty III: The Poetry of Patches. Courtesy the artist and Nonfrasa Gallery.