Wimo Ambala Bayang

kohesi Initiatives is pleased to present [Foot Step Approach], Wimo Ambala Bayang's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Over the past twenty years, Wimo has become a distinctive voice in contemporary Indonesian photography, pushing and interpreting the medium in unexpected ways.

“[Foot Step Approach]”—a phrase laden with enigma—comes from Wimo’s personal notebook. A pair of verso–recto pages in that book is almost entirely fi lled with dense black strokes that coalesce into a thick, dark fi eld. At the bottom of the page, the phrase—bracketed by two square boxes—appears inscribed in a lighter tone. The phrase was deliberately chosen as the exhibition title not only because the drawing on that page is one of the materials Wimo has reinterpreted as a new work, but also because it functions, in signifi cant measure, as a kind of fulcrum for the curatorial reading of the exhibition as a whole.

Within this curatorial framework, footstep becomes a metaphor for three key concepts—trace, movement, and temporality. These three notions bind the works together while also re-polemicizing, from a post-Benjaminian vantage, the antagonistic relation between aura and reproducibility. Approach, meanwhile—a term whose semantic doubleness is acknowledged from the outset, oscillating between “approach” as conceptual method (a guide to thinking) and “approaching” as literal action (a mode of doing)—operates as a poetic disposition, even a poetic fi guration, in which the metaphor of the “footstep” is grasped both as a way of thinking and a way of acting.

The exhibition marks a pivotal moment in Wimo’s artistic journey, as he re-examines his archive and practice, exploring the discourse of the image and its modes of production, encompassing both image-making and image-generating. The constellation of works on view—ranging from photographic series, painting series, and mural interventions to sonic compositions and video—articulates a spectrum of artistic strategies that signal, target, and interrogate the nature of the refl exive understandings available to us with regard to contemporary visual culture, as well as the institutional mechanisms of contemporary art that at once populate and shape that culture. [Foot Step Approach] extends Wimo’s long-standing engagement with the politics of images, their circulation, and their cultural signifi cance.