Murni’s sculpted expressions and transnational adventures
‘Hello, Mbok Murni,’ I whispered when I saw Murni’s soft sculpture Thumb (n.d) in an all-female group exhibition Shaping Geographies: Art | Woman | Southeast Asia at Gajah Gallery, Singapore, in 2019. It was the first time I had encountered her soft sculpture outside of Indonesia. These are not the usual works you would expect to see of Murni’s, if you knew her works from the 1990s. Yet, its form is not far from what she more famously painted: a disembodied, female body often sexually animated and exposed.
