About the Exhibition
The Back Room is proud to announce our latest gallery collaboration with Jakarta-based ara contemporary, presenting the solo exhibition of Iwan Effendi. Titled Co-Presence, the exhibition marks Iwan’s second time exhibiting in Kuala Lumpur, having previously exhibited Two Shoes for Dancing at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Project Room in 2009. Over a decade has passed in the time since, and Iwan Effendi is now one of the leading names in Indonesian contemporary art, having shown and participated in residencies all around the world.
Iwan Effendi is based in Jogjakarta, where he also serves as the co-founder of Papermoon puppet theatre. Under Papermoon, Iwan has become renowned for his distinct style of depicting figures, featuring large, round heads with beadlike eyes and tiny, worried mouths, giving off the impression of childlike innocence and a mix of wonder and fear. His beloved, larger-than-life puppets (known as boneka in Indonesian) have delighted audiences all around the world with their unique appearances, their impressive mechanisms for movement, and their immersive set designs and stories. He extends the immersiveness of puppet theatre to exhibition-making, creating sculptures and murals to accompany his artworks. Co-Presence is no different, featuring a site-specific, mixed-media charcoal mural alongside several new paintings on canvas.
Papermoon informs Iwan’s art practice, which explores deeper considerations of the relation of the body to art, and image with reality. The themes of Co-Presence explore the inseparability of the self from the performance of the self, the puppeteer (consciousness) from the puppet (the body). Within the context of performance art, the body serves as both medium and narrative, a living stage that continually reinterprets the meaning of its own existence. In Iwan’s practice as an artist and puppeteer, the body serves as the point of departure for a profound philosophical and theatrical exploration, where the boundaries between subject and object, the living and the crafted, become blurred. Though featuring only simplified facial characteristics, the figures in Iwan’s paintings and drawings effectively convey a great fear of the unknown, expressed through dark criss-crossing shadows and a lack of contours to the figure. Some of the drawings feature snippets of dark scenes, perhaps fragments from nightmares or fairytales.
Iwan’s artistic practice explores the tension latent in performance, between presence and absence, immersion and expression, resemblance and concealment. It is through the artist-as-actor’s continuous negotiation between these factors that the inanimate objects of his artworks and puppets are able to transform into beloved creatures for audiences to believe in, sympathise with, and love, reducing the artist’s own body into a vessel for channelling the great forces of the imagination. Co-Presence seems to be testing the limits of this vessel, and how much of himself the artist can give to his work before the boundaries give way completely.
Exhibition dates:
12 June – 12 July 2026
Opening reception:
Thursday, 11 June from 7pm onwards
Enquiries:
hello@thebackroomkl.com
About the artist
Iwan Effendi (b. 1979) is an artist and puppeteer based in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. His artistic practice spans painting, drawing, puppet-making, and performance, grounded in narrative and emotion. He is one of the founders and artistic directors of Papermoon Puppet Theatre, a puppet studio and collective based in Jogjakarta which also organises Pesta Boneka, an international biennale of puppet-related practitioners. Iwan’s puppets are famous for their signature expressionless, naive faces, which invite viewers to project their own emotions upon them and their own interpretations of their narratives.
Iwan has exhibited all around the world. Notable recent solo exhibitions include articulate (2024, Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo), preload (2023, Mizuma Gallery, Singapore), Daydreaming Face (2021, Ruci Art, Jakarta), Face to Face (2019, Mizuma Gallery, Singapore), Eye of the Messenger (2011, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore), and Two Shoes for Dancing (2009, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur). He has participated in group exhibitions across Bulgaria, Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, France, Japan, the USA, and Mexico. He has been a resident artist with the Kochi Museum of Art, Japan (2015), Federation Square Melbourne (2014), and the Asian Cultural Council in New York (2009–10).
About the collaborators
ara contemporary is a contemporary art gallery in Jakarta, established in 2025. Its name is an abbreviation of its founders: Arlin, Ramadanti, and Chandra. Beyond that, the word holds a layered meaning that aligns with the gallery’s philosophy, with ara meaning a place of shelter, adaptability, and consideration of others in Sanskrit. These values are at the heart of ara contemporary, shaping its role in the Southeast Asian arts community.
The Back Room is an alternative space for intimate exhibitions within The Zhongshan Building, in Kuala Lumpur. The Back Room is more than just a space: it is an opportunity for new and ongoing collaborations between artists, creatives and curators. The Back Room also hopes to position itself as an easily accessible platform for new audiences to discover, appreciate and collect art.
Installation
Artworks
Coming soon