I have been to Indonesia, but I have never experienced a pasar malam (night market), the subject of a cross-cultural screenprint-based exhibition currently touring Australia. A pasar malam is not just any night market. In Java it’s a pop-up carnival that travels from town to town, featuring amusement rides, comfort snacks, and cheap products for sale. This format varies across Indonesia’s regions: sometimes the markets occur on a more regular schedule, or have a more specialised focus, such as in a pasar senthir (lamplight “second-hand” market) or pasar kilithikan (junk market). There is also the annual Sekatan night market held near Jogja Palace as part of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday celebrations.

The spectacle and the symbolic importance of pasar malam are explored in this exhibition by fifteen artists working with Jogjakarta-based printmaking collective Krack!, alongside fellow Krack! member Alfin Agnuba (whose digital print-based work is in NCCA’s Boxset Gallery), and film-making team Salius, Khoril Maqin, Febrian A. Hasibuan, and Muhammed Dzulgarnain, which contributed three video works. The diversity of experiences encompassed by Indonesia’s market culture is matched by the diversity of styles on display. At one extreme is the geometric abstraction of Darwin/Jogja-based Amina McConvell’s Good Fortune (2024), its interplay of jagged and curvy forms expressing the sensory overload of the pasar malam. At the other end is Jogja-based Ipeh Nur’s Pasar Senthir (2024), the exhibition’s hero image, which offers an homage to Java’s second-hand markets via a scene of ethereally floating figures and objects. In both these works, the market is presented as a site of kaleidoscopic multiplicity.

The works of the fifteen artists collaborating with Krack! are (mostly) realised through a 150cm x 200cm three-colour screenprint. This uniformity of medium underscores not only stylistic differences, as with the abovementioned works of McConvell and Nur, but also differing conceptual approaches. Tobias Richardson (Rumah Hantu, 2024) and Prihatmoko Moki (Sakati, 2025) both respond to Jogja’s annual Sakati (Sekatan) night market. Moki’s work adopts a kind of classical symmetry in conjuring the event’s nationalist and religious symbolism through a show of Hindu deities, Islamic ritual, and gamelan performance. Richardson, by contrast, focuses on the event as macabre entertainment, conjuring skulls and demonic creatures in his depiction of a haunted palace façade complete with expletive-laced (English) graffiti. Enka Komariah also responds to a particular night market, the Pasar Malam Jumat Kliwon held at Parangkusomo Beach, south of Jogjakarta, whose blend of faith, folklore, and fetish coalesces with dense realism in Komariah’s print. Roda Roda Gila (Crazy Wheels) (2024) by Jogja-based Restu Ratnaningtyas turns to a particular night market ride, the Tong Edan, in which motorcyclists (in a show of centrifugal speed) ride inside a giant timber barrel. The ride recalls the night market’s bygone heyday, from the 1960s to the early 2000s, when such technical feats could still gather an awe-struck crowd, before they were replaced by more digital forms of entertainment. Ratnaningtyas taps this pre-digital nostalgia, playfully deconstructing the ride as a do-it-yourself manual of component parts, which is actualised in the exhibition by the assemblage of these screen-printed parts as a miniature Tong Edan circuit.

The three short films in the exhibition (via projection and a TV monitor) reference pasar malam contexts partly for those like myself who have not directly experienced one. In some respects, as the films show, these markets are not unlike the sideshow alleys that in Australia are often attached to royal agricultural shows, or which exist as standalone carnivals. One of the films montages scenes from 1980s and 1990s Indonesian horror films that included pasar malam settings, adding a tone of grotesquerie and comedy to the exhibition. Another film comprises black-and-white footage of a pasar malam in 1943. It’s projected onto the back wall of the gallery’s Screenroom together with three screenprints: two black-and-white and one (Komariah’s) sepia. In 1943 Indonesia was under Japanese occupation, and this is evidenced throughout the footage by details such as Japanese writing and flags. The pasar malam itself has origins in Indonesia’s 300-odd-year Dutch colonial period (the 1943 film footage is sourced from the online archive of The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies). These historic contexts allow us to consider the pasar malam as a mirror of broader, changing body politics. The films also reinforce the idea of pasar malam as a highly mediated subject, mirroring the intent and process of the overall exhibition.

The pasar malam’s darker “shadow worlds” (as the exhibition wall text describes them) are fuel for works in the exhibition by Alfin Agnuba, Leyla Stevens, Malcolm Le Smith, Jumaadi, and Timoteus Anggawan Kusno. Agnuba’s Menggali-gali (2024) and Stevens’s Witness (2024) confront murder at the hands of the state. In Witness (2024) the image of a banyan tree at a carpark market in Bali (taken from Stevens’s 2016 film Witness) marks the site of an unacknowledged mass grave from Indonesia’s 1965-66 genocide/politicide under the military rule of Suharto, which foreshadowed his reign as dictator-president under the so-called New Order (1967-1998). The subject of Menggali-gali is the 1980s “mysterious shootings” (Penembakan Misterius) of (mostly) young men in Indonesia during this New Order. These shootings belong to the shadow world of the malam, often taking place in the middle of the night.

There is poetic gravitas in Kusno’s Silencio (2025), a stark and sobering archival image of a tiger pelt in close-up black-and-white. The concept of pasar (market/spectacle) in this work relates both to Indonesia’s historic (and today illegal) trade in tiger pelts, and to the nineteenth-century ritual of Rampokan, in which the public display of slaughtering a tiger reinforced the Sultan of Jogjakarta’s power. There is poetic gravitas too in Jumaadi’s Prajurit Jaga Malam (2024), which takes its name from Chairil Anwar’s independence poem (translated as Night Guard Soldier) from 1948. Like Ratnaningtyas, Jumaadi takes the screen-printed paper off the wall, the work’s weighty ode to the human toll of independence from Dutch colonial rule realised through a delicate cut-out of rows of skulls hanging from a tree.

My favourite section of the exhibition is a side gallery that, in a nod to pasar malam festivity, is bordered by a length of coloured light bulbs. The lights frame Rudi Hermawan’s Mystical object; Whispering in the Midst of the Crowd (2025), which hangs opposite Le Smith’s 101 Torments of Hell (2024). The room’s other two walls support a TV monitor with two films, and McConvell’s Good Fortune. The works in this space epitomise the imaginative depth and diversity of the project: McConvell’s formalist abstraction, Hermawan’s window into a childhood fascination with magic and ritual, and Le Smith’s comically gruesome chart of deadly sins in synch with the TV schlock horror scenes at its left. Hermawan’s mystical bent also whispers to Tamarra’s Rajah (2025), found elsewhere in the exhibition. Rajah, a talismanic script of Arabic origin often coupled with symbolic diagrams, forms a rippling dimension in Tamarra’s enigmatic work, anchored around a serpentine space enclosing eyes, mermaids and a pair of entwined figures. It’s a seemingly rare work from Indonesia that embraces transgenderism.

Hermawan and Le Smith are founding members of Krack! (along with Prihatmoko Moki and Sukma Smita), and the exhibition is really a testament to Krack’s evolution since 2013—both its increasingly innovative approach to printmaking, and its cultivation of collaborative networks. The exhibiting artists are Indonesian and Australian, based in one or both of these countries or elsewhere. Many have come from formal training at the Institut Seni Indonesia or Universitas Sanata Dharma in Jogjakarta, and the National Art School in Sydney, and several have exhibited in group shows at 16albermarle Project Space, Sydney, which is facilitating the exhibition’s Australian tour. Technically, the exhibition was a challenge for the studio to upscale their screen-printing facilities, which involved relocating to a bigger space, making screens and worktables from scratch, and adjusting to the pull of the large-scale print. It also involved a lot more creative input from Krack! in translating the artist’s original image to print, working in some cases with small drawings and sketches. Richardson’s Rumah Hantu, for example, is composed from a series of small gouache paintings. For Ipeh Nur’s print, the studio created their own inks in tune with the artist’s research into and preference for natural pigments.

At the artist talks that accompanied the exhibition, Le Smith confided that at one point the exhibition was called “Indonesian Gothic,” a title that was eventually abandoned because “gothic” may be seen as a Eurocentric term. It may have also been a bit close to Monster Pop!, a previous exhibition of contemporary art from Australia and Indonesia curated by Darwin-based Yum Cha Collective (Andrew Ewing and Fiona Carter) and shown at the Museum and Art Gallery NT (MAGNT) in Darwin in 2015/16. (Jumaadi’s work featured in both exhibitions.) MAGNT is also supporting Pasar Malam in hosting a series of related public programs. That the exhibition’s Australian tour begins in Darwin is fitting in many ways given historic ties between Darwin/the Top End and Indonesia. The NCCA (and formerly 24HR Art) has a long history of engagement with its region, and particularly East Timor and Indonesia, since the gallery’s inception in the late 1980s and as recently shown by its exhibition Taripang Dharripa Trepang (2024-25) foregrounding Top End Aboriginal and Makassan cultural exchange. Pasar Malam is also a return to NCCA for Le Smith, who was the gallery’s program manager in the early 2000s and whose time in Darwin played a significant part perhaps in sparking his interest in and eventual relocation to Indonesia. For most of its life the NCCA has also been located amidst a bustling pasar—the Parap Market, which takes place each Saturday and is frequented by locals and tourists alike for its Southeast Asian-style street food and artisanal stalls. The location is great for broadening access to contemporary art and for boosting NCCA’s audience numbers. As with Pasar Malam, it also enlivens thinking around the connections between culture, commerce, and art.