At The Gallery / Wong Pinter by Romila

May 23rd 2023 – July 20th 2023, Massy Arts will host, Wong Pinter, a window installation by writer, facilitator and cyber-mystic of kejawen and Zoroastrian ancestry Romila, meant to invoke the feeling of being faced with a portal and invites viewers to sit in the potential discomfort of not receiving further invitation to pass through it.

The artist says: “Jam karet” is an Indonesian incantation used to bend time, declaring simply while the colonial clock ticks: time is made of rubber and can stretch as needed. This is the pace in which my writing and archival reclamations occur, revealing themselves as spells against capitalistic urgency and exploring within it liminalities including: language as portals for time travel, grief as a venue for timelessness, non-linearities of queerness and, more recently, the open sourcing of closed knowledge.

The Massy Arts Gallery is located at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
The gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm to 5pm.
Entrance is free, and masks are mandatory.

To contact the gallery, send an email to: info@massyarts.com.

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Wong Pinter

Romila explains:

Of the seven kejawen realms, there are two that are closed knowledge–revealed only certain members in Javanese society called the wong pinter. These practitioners of spiritual strength and readiness are invited to traverse realities and perform rituals or shows for interdimensional audiences. One such show is the wayang kulit or shadow-puppet theatre.

Today, however, you can find detailed and vivid ethnographic accounts on these secret realms online. These public repositories attempt to, simultaneously, document, archive and broadcast to community members in this diasporic present who may be in search of this hidden knowledge. But with the persistence of colonial theft, facilitated by a globalized panopticon and normalized for consumption by museums and academic institutions, who else looks on?

My piece “Wong Pinter,” (an old kejawen phrase that translates to the person in our community who holds closed knowledge) is meant to invoke the feeling of being faced with a portal and invites viewers to sit in the potential discomfort of not receiving further invitation to pass through it.

Here, five different patterns of batik Parang (a motif associated with divine epiphany and perseverance) are cut into shape of Semar–the guardian spirit of Java–and painted over with Black 3.0 (a non-patented version of vantablack, a paint that absorbs 98-99% of light). Mimicking the shape of a wayang (shadow puppet), the cut-out casts a curvy “shadow” of batik Parang that opens a portal, depicted by a circular canvas also painted over with Black 3.0. Due to the absorption of light, when eclipsed, both Semar and the portal become indiscernable.

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The Artist

Romila is a writer, facilitator and cyber-mystic of kejawen and Zoroastrian ancestry based on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and Səl̓ílwətaʔ lands. Through jam karet, an Indonesian incantation to bend time, Romila curates explorations of liminality including: language as a portal for time travel, grief as a venue for timelessness and non-linearities of queerness. Child of a dream interpreter, great-grandchild of birthing doulas, Romila carries the gifts of intuition, groundedness and future-telling to hold spaces to gather in community through literature, spellmaking and rituals of grief.

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