Ines Katamso, 'Sacred Resilience'

SACRED RESILIENCE

Ines Katamso returns printmaking to the earth

Since the start of the new millennium, Indonesian contemporary art has been shaped by emerging subcultures, alternative spaces, and socially engaged movements. Millennials and Gen Z—the first digital-native generations—grew up amid the shift from analogue culture to the internet, moving between physical and virtual worlds. Their practices draw on new technologies and broader access to knowledge while engaging with social and environmental concerns. Unlike the 1970s-80s Indonesian New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru/GSRB - canonically regarded as defining the emergence of contemporary art practice in the country), which challenged artistic conventions as a way of influencing art history and culture, many artists who emerged in the 2000s use art to engage directly with the world and to navigate complex identities, livelihoods - and most significantly today: our decaying living environment. 

This generation’s work unfolds as society moves towards Society 5.0: a human-centred vision that integrates digital and physical worlds to address challenges such as climate change, inequality, and food insecurity. Yet this vision remains entangled with global industry and capitalism, and is often shaped by centralised power. It also intersects with the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which human activity profoundly alters earth’s systems. As people increasingly transform ecosystems and threaten their own survival, the need to fundamentally change how we live and use resources becomes ever more urgent.

Living in Indonesia means facing pressing ecological crises. As I write, forest fires and deforestation in Kalimantan and Sumatra remain unresolved. Bali, meanwhile, has experienced repeated flooding since last year. This stands in stark contrast to the island’s hosting of the G20 Summit in 2022, where sustainability, climate change, and net-zero targets featured prominently—often more as rhetoric and slogans than as a call to action. Environmental awareness is part of the collective consciousness of Indonesia’s younger generation, and many artists embrace it as an inescapable subject—not only as an aesthetic concern, but as a matter of belief and ideology. Among them is Bali-based artist Ines Katamso.

Katamso’s multidisciplinary practice moves between scientific inquiry, spirituality, and ancestral craft. Attuned to the natural world and the ecological crises unfolding in Indonesia and beyond, she traces a profound paradox of our time: humanity recognises the damage it inflicts on nature, yet remains bound to the systems that sustain it. In response to this seemingly inescapable passage towards extinction, Katamso turns to art as a form of poetic engagement—an invitation to attend, remember, and remain with uncertainty. Her work begins with the earth’s own materials: soil, clay, stone, fossils, and specimens, transformed into pigments and forms that carry their histories within them.

Katamso’s multicultural background—she was born into a Javanese-French family and divides her time between Bali and France—has strongly influenced her sense of self and her art. Like many artists of her generation, she initially worked in fashion, design, and illustration. In the early 2010s, after becoming involved in art projects in Bali and other cities, she committed herself fully to contemporary art. An avid reader of science and the philosophy of nature, Katamso brings together scientific inquiry, spirituality, and an organic visual language. She combines natural and manufactured materials through what she calls an “ancestral craft” approach. Dissatisfied with conventional art materials, she began making her own pastels and pigments from soil, gemstones, and rocks.

In 2022, her practice turned towards microorganisms, bacterial morphogenesis, and fossils. These interests came together in Inquirious, her 2023 exhibition, Inquirious, at Semarang Gallery. The exhibition explored human identity through the relationship between nature and culture, asking whether humanity can live in harmony with the environment. Its installation brought together geology, biology, and mythology, including Katamso’s collections of fossils and soil. She also used dust, concrete, and terracotta to evoke a cycle in which everything forms from particles and eventually returns to them.

Katamso developed these ideas further in Post-Strata, presented at ARTJOG 2024. The work addresses the sixth mass extinction, driven primarily by human activity, and focuses on plastic: a ubiquitous material associated with pollution, soil degradation, genetic mutation, and the loss of marine life. It asks what legacy humanity would leave if it disappeared. Inspired by how scientists read layers of soil to uncover fossils, geological events, and traces of human activity, Katamso created “future fossils” from construction debris and recycled plastic collected near her studio. She used scagliola, an ancient technique for imitating stone, to give these materials new textures and forms.

Her subsequent work, Welcome to the Plastic Age, presented at the 2024 Biennale de Lyon, also reflects on environmental decline and the legacy humanity may leave behind. It considers how anthropocentrism has distanced people from nature and obscured our sense of evolution and spirituality. The figure of Naga Antaboga, an ancient Javanese earth spirit, offers a vision of renewal: a force that might outlast debris and microplastics and awaken the earth’s lost magnificence. The work’s meaning is inseparable from how it was made. Katamso collaborated with craftspeople in Singaraja and a plastic-recycling collective that supports people with disabilities, working together from pre-production through installation in Lyon. This process reflects the growing role of community-based environmental initiatives in Bali.

Still, Katamso resists being labelled a “sustainability artist.” She sees the artist’s role as distinct from practical political activism. For her, visual poetics can open up space for dialogue and reflection. Rather than preach, an artwork can use aesthetics to reach people more deeply. In one of our conversations, Katamso told me she was startled by some responses to her work at ARTJOG, where some viewers interpreted its message as pessimistic and apocalyptic. She sees it differently: her premise rests on art’s ability to make peace with situations and crises. This, she suggests, reflects her generation’s perspective: accepting what has been handed down to them while taking a position on the present and the future. Her generation did not cause the climate crisis; it inherited it, along with other unresolved problems. These are inescapable conditions with which young people must come to terms as they strive to overcome them. For Katamso, being an artist offers a way to face what is happening today and, to some extent, to welcome and embrace the future—even the possibility of extinction—with the enduring hope of finding balance between humanity and nature.

Katamso is currently exploring printmaking, drawn to the medium’s dual nature. Historically, printmaking’s democratic qualities have helped make knowledge, science, and other discoveries more accessible. At the same time, the medium is closely associated with industrial mass production and toxic waste. In Indonesia, printmaking has a long history, dating back to the independence movement, when posters supported the nation’s struggle. Its artistic possibilities gained renewed attention in the mid-1970s, as the aforementioned GSRB challenged established practices and responded to a changing culture. From the late 1990s onwards, urban culture and digital technology further broadened the ways prints could be made and used. More recently, analogue printmaking has re-emerged in the contemporary art scene as an alternative medium that stands out between conventional fine art and digital art. Artists from diverse backgrounds—including painting, photography, and ceramics—have explored its possibilities across disciplines. Katamso’s new series, Sacred Resilience, is part of this renewed interest.

Sacred Resilience begins where biological conservation reaches its limits. It asks whether art can create a contemporary iconography through which ecosystems might once again become meaningful. Katamso’s engagement with these questions is rooted in her bicultural identity, shaped by Indonesia and France. Rather than choosing between these traditions, her practice grows in the space where they intersect, seeking a visual language that brings scientific observation into dialogue with the sacred. The series emerged from her research at BRIN, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, where she encountered herbarium archives documenting endangered Indonesian plants.

The herbarium images Katamso selected depict plants from the Nepenthes family, which trap and digest insects in their pitcher-shaped leaves. Many tropical pitcher plants are endangered, despite their importance to the ecosystems in which they grow. Their vulnerability points to the damage already affecting their native forests. In Indonesian, these plants are known as kantong semar, or “Semar’s pouch,” a name inspired by the rounded shape of their pitchers and their philosophical associations. Semar is an important figure in Javanese wayang: a corpulent, clown-like character who is also understood as an incarnation of God. His sacred name is Bethara Ismaya, and he is the elder brother of Bethara Guru, king of the gods. In Javanese thought, Semar embodies manunggaling kawula-gusti—the harmony between God and humanity—and, by extension, the balance and harmony of the world.

In the series, images from the herbarium archive are repeated and arranged in symmetrical compositions that draw on Christian, Balinese, and Javanese visual traditions. Katamso transfers these forms onto metal plates using intaglio, then prints them onto textiles with pigments made from soils and green clay gathered during her travels - replacing the chemical-based ink massively used in this medium. She subsequently bends the plates into shrine-like sculptures, as if providing a closure to the reproduction process by deforming its masterplates.  Together, the prints and sculptures form a series of devotional sites—an invitation to pay respect to the endangered natural beings that inspired them.

Sacred Resilience attends not only to the measurable disappearance of species, but also to the fading of the cultural frameworks through which they were once known: the taxonomies, rituals, and images that made them visible and meaningful. When these ways of understanding vanish, ecosystems become harder to notice, mourn, and protect. The exhibition turns to this less visible register of extinction, asking what it might mean to rebuild it through material practice rather than argument. In Katamso’s hands, printmaking becomes both process and ritual, its materiality returned to the living matter of the earth. Soil pigments carry minerals, fungi, bacteria, roots, seeds, and other organic matter. Together, they form a shifting substance in which life emerges, decomposes, and, resiliently, renews itself.

Farah Wardani, Ubud, October 2026