Victoria Kosasie is a performance artist known for works that explore politics and poetics surrounding the body. With a practice grounded by the complex histories of femininity and politics of motherhood in Indonesia, Kosasie activates her research with performances that place the past in the present and site-specific performance artefacts that transgress the ethnographic boundaries of her findings. Kosasie’s somatic practice is a symbiotic relationship between research and performance that facilitates discourse, contrasting the different iterations in which patriarchies have governed performativity and motherhood.
Born to a Javanese mother and a Chinese-Indonesian father, the positionality of her ancestry during the wake of Indonesia’s independence is the focal point in which the tensions of intergenerational trauma arise in her performances. Lost archives, alternative histories, and speculative futures are the textures and patinas of her practice, as she draws from familial archives (of photographs, texts, and conversations) and post-colonial and feminist literature. In the narratives of her performances, fragmented histories of national and familial identity intertwine to speculate what will be post-human. The ‘body’, for Kosasie, becomes the instinctive medium which captures the temporal qualities of her practice; her body becomes the vehicle for endurance, against entropy, through which tensions converge, collide, manifest, and ultimately dissipate with time.
Victoria Kosasie (b. 2000, Jakarta), lives and works in London, UK. Kosasie has exhibited internationally, including at Mizuma Gallery, Singapore (2024); APT Gallery, London; Lethaby Gallery, London; Christies, London; ISA Art Gallery, Jakarta; Angkor Photo Festival, Siem Reap (all 2023); Bermondsey Project Space, London; Jakarta International Photo Festival; Lawangwangi Creative Centre, Bandung; Ugly Duck, London; and Goldsmiths CCA, London (all 2022). Kosasie is the winner of the Barry Martin Prize for Experimental Art 2022, and is the recipient of the Seventh biennial Bandung Contemporary Art Award (BaCAA 7).
Born to a Javanese mother and a Chinese-Indonesian father, the positionality of her ancestry during the wake of Indonesia’s independence is the focal point in which the tensions of intergenerational trauma arise in her performances. Lost archives, alternative histories, and speculative futures are the textures and patinas of her practice, as she draws from familial archives (of photographs, texts, and conversations) and post-colonial and feminist literature. In the narratives of her performances, fragmented histories of national and familial identity intertwine to speculate what will be post-human. The ‘body’, for Kosasie, becomes the instinctive medium which captures the temporal qualities of her practice; her body becomes the vehicle for endurance, against entropy, through which tensions converge, collide, manifest, and ultimately dissipate with time.
Victoria Kosasie (b. 2000, Jakarta), lives and works in London, UK. Kosasie has exhibited internationally, including at Mizuma Gallery, Singapore (2024); APT Gallery, London; Lethaby Gallery, London; Christies, London; ISA Art Gallery, Jakarta; Angkor Photo Festival, Siem Reap (all 2023); Bermondsey Project Space, London; Jakarta International Photo Festival; Lawangwangi Creative Centre, Bandung; Ugly Duck, London; and Goldsmiths CCA, London (all 2022). Kosasie is the winner of the Barry Martin Prize for Experimental Art 2022, and is the recipient of the Seventh biennial Bandung Contemporary Art Award (BaCAA 7).