Gajah Gallery Singapore presents Source Code, the second solo exhibition by Balinese artist Jemana Murti, opening in October 2026. The exhibition presents a focused examination of Jemana’s evolving practice in response to his Balinese identity within modernity, exploring the tensions between cultural heritage and technological advancement.
Raised in a family of artists and deeply influenced by Balinese Hindu traditions, Jemana’s practice is rooted in an ongoing engagement with the cultural forms and knowledge systems of his home. His work is informed by his interest in ethnomathematics and by the use of proportion, repetition, and spatial relationships within Balinese artistic and architectural traditions.
In Source Code, Jemana brings these inherited forms into dialogue with technologies of the present, using 3D scanning, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence to create sculptural works marked by deliberate distortions and “glitches.” These visual disruptions signal the inherent limitations of technology in replicating the cultural and spiritual significance embedded within these forms. At the same time, he draws a parallel between the reverence once accorded to divine figures and the growing authority given to technologies that are increasingly perceived as “all-knowing.”
This tension takes on a new material dimension in a recent expansion of Jemana’s practice, through a series of bronze sculptures created in collaboration with Yogya Art Lab. The works begin as digitally reconstructed and warped forms, which are then translated into bronze, carrying the distortions of the virtual realm into physical form. The resulting sculptures bring together the instability of digital manipulation with the weight and permanence of bronze, a material long associated with durability. Through this process, Jemana brings a central tension within his practice into sharper focus: the fluidity of technological systems alongside the persistence of cultural forms, and how technological transformation might nevertheless carry forward or reconfigure something of their cultural and material continuity.
