Sriwhana Spong, ‘HA HA HA’ at MUMA

Mist moves through Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA as a metaphor. This phenomenon signifies instability, unknowing as a means of knowing and refusal of cultural reductionism.

Spong is often inspired by a small or contingent encounter—a text, an image, a living organism or a historical trace—which becomes the starting point for inquiry. Her practice unfolds nonlinearly, taking divergent routes as she follows these encounters through experiential, material, speculative and historical research. By engaging with multiple approaches toward a subject, she asks how knowledge is produced while making perceptible different ways of knowing. By drawing on parallel, past and unperceived currents, Spong’s work revels in a plurality that awakens our senses to other beings and languages. This is a method for living relationally instead of hermetically.

Underpinning her work is an oscillation between intimacy and distance, informed by the relationship of her body to her Balinese heritage and of the human body to the world. This oscillation is also informed by her research into the particular and ecstatic practices of women mystics that were attempts at translating the mystic encounter into text, image and sound.

Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA is the first major solo exhibition in Australia of the London-based Balinese New Zealand/Aotearoan artist. Spanning the breadth of Spong’s practice, it includes film, sculpture, textiles and drawings and features two new works commissioned for the exhibition. The exhibition is curated by MUMA Senior Curator Pip Wallis and Melanie Oliver, and will travel to Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, where it will be co-curated with Director Abby Cunane in October 2026.

The exhibition begins with Spong’s film The painter-tailor (2019) which combines 16mm film and HD video footage collected by the artist, her relatives, and the family dog. The film revolves around an untitled painting by Spong’s grandfather, I Gusti Made Rundu (1918–1993). This painting, the family home, and her father’s memories draw together intertwined histories of colonisation, tourism and artistic legacy.

Within the Kamasan painting tradition to which Made Rundu returned in his later works, the aun-aun motif expresses the continuous vibration of energy in all spaces. In his final painting, her grandfather transformed the aun-aun into mosquito-like insects. The motif and this metamorphosis are explored by Spong in the exhibition through sculptures, drawings, sound and film. In 2025 Spong learned to draw the aun-aun from a master painter in Bali. The method in which it is painted evoked, for Spong, the phenomenon of mist, giving rise to her new film, AD (2026) commissioned by MUMA and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery for the exhibition. Shot on 16mm film, AD takes the form of a road trip to Dartmoor, England. The footage is accompanied by a text written by Spong in collaboration with AI large language models that extends Lord Byron’s final and unfinished poem Don Juan (1818-1824), written toward the end of the Industrial Revolution.

The film’s soundtrack, composed by Lachlan Anderson, is created using a new addition to Spong’s evolving personal orchestra. Instrument L (Made Rundu) proposes a sonic dimension to the aun-aun motif and its metamorphosis, through the work of the artist and her grandfather, into insects and mist. Since 2016 Spong has been creating a series of sculptural instruments inspired by the Balinese Gamelan—an ensemble of percussive instruments traditionally tuned to a pitch specific to the village to which it belonged. Each of Spong’s instruments is dedicated to a collaborator, interlocutor, family member or friend. At MUMA, the instruments will be activated by invited musicians at particular moments during the exhibition. At intervals Instrument C (Claire) and Instrument F (Alice W) will be played by a member of the MUMA team according to a score determining when each instrument is struck.

Recognising the practice of gamelan performance, from which Spong draws inspiration, components of the Gamelan Digul from the Music Archive of Monash University will be included in the exhibition. This Javanese instrument was made by Surakarta-born musician and political activist Bapak Pontjopangrawit (1893–c.1965) and fellow inmates in 1927 at the Dutch prison camp at Tanah Merah in the jungle on the Digul River, West Irian (now Papua New Guinea). The inmates crafted the Gamelan from items at hand, including food tins, old doors and animal hides. It was brought by the “Digulists” to Australia, presented to the Museum of Victoria in 1946 and later transferred to Monash University in 1976. The Gamelan Digul will be played at the opening event of the exhibition, a very rare event due to the fragility of the instrument.

The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue featuring essays and poetic responses by Ariana Reines, Tessa Laird, Vera Mey, May Adadol Ingawanij and the artist, published by MUMA and Perimeter Editions. The book is edited by MUMA curators Pip Wallis and Stephanie Berlangieri and designed by Narelle Brewer for Perimeter Bureau.

Sriwhana Spong is represented in Aotearoa by Lett Thomas