Identified for large-scale, technology-driven installations that mix on a regular basis objects, electronics, sound and components of the pure world, Indonesian artist Bagus Pandega explores the parallels between the mechanics of natural life and human know-how. His apply facilities on experimenting with hybrid ecosystems constructed from audio system, sensors, lighting parts, circuit boards and crops—assemblages that come to life, transfer, reply or produce sound when activated by viewers, setting in movement a circulation of sources and energies between natural and technological processes.
For his first institutional debut in New York, “Daya Benda,” on view on the Swiss Institute by means of January 4, 2026, Pandega presents three formidable installations that study the interdependence inherent in using pure sources, remodeling the area into a fancy dwelling laboratory the place these hybrid collaborative methods between human and natural unfold earlier than guests’ eyes.
The center of the present, encountered instantly upon entry, is Hyperpnea Inexperienced (2024), a big suspended mechanical sculpture composed of concentric rings lined with clear vessels containing Indonesian minerals, frequent American houseplants, lights and a music field. All parts are wired right into a single system related to an oxygen machine and a biofeedback mechanism that responds to the metabolic alerts of each crops and other people. As viewers exhale carbon dioxide, the set up releases oxygen into the area. Borrowing its title from the medical time period describing fast or deep respiration to fulfill elevated oxygen demand, the work turns into a reside expertise of the unequal distribution and extraction of one of many planet’s most treasured components: oxygen. By means of this circle, Pandega reveals our dependency on the pure world—one we concurrently deplete by means of unstable consumption—whereas illuminating the interdependence between natural and synthetic methods. By embedding viewers inside these suggestions loops of electrical energy, breath and motion, Pandega foregrounds relations formed by cycles of life, extraction and reciprocity.
He started growing his personal oxygen-concentrator machine throughout the COVID pandemic, initially as a civilian software for private survival. “In Indonesia, my household and I needed to wait in extraordinarily lengthy strains simply to get oxygen, and I didn’t wish to take that threat. So I started researching and constructing a number of oxygen machines myself,” he recollects. The mannequin now built-in into Hyperpnea Inexperienced is essentially the most environment friendly one he created at the moment, approaching medical-grade performance.
Pandega’s background is in sculpture—he graduated from Institut Teknologi Bandung with a BA in effective artwork. After college, nevertheless, he moved away from conventional sculptural apply and commenced constructing mechanical and digital items, initially as a method of incomes a dwelling, then as a strategy to reimagine modern sculpture as one thing able to addressing the problems of our time, particularly the rising pressure between anthropogenic interventions and pure processes. “I moved very slowly at first, working with easy mechanisms, and I stored growing from there. It’s been about fifteen years of steady experimentation and development,” he acknowledges. What initially aligned with the legacy of kinetic artwork quickly took on a unique urgency as his machines turned autos to handle useful resource inequity, the disruption of ecological steadiness and the results of human technological dominance over nature.
These themes are notably resonant for Pandega and his technology in Indonesia, who’ve witnessed the nation’s accelerated modernization usually at the price of its pure sources and biodiversity—marked by uncontrolled deforestation and aggressive extraction fueled by international markets.
“After COVID, I noticed I might take these machines additional. I couldn’t cease fascinated by how the ecological state of affairs in Indonesia has modified—particularly the fixed deforestation,” he displays. “Even earlier than COVID, it was horrible, however we had someway gotten used to it. Yearly, you see forests burning in every single place. Throughout COVID, there was a pause, and you could possibly see the Earth recovering a bit of from mining and different pressures. It made clear what our interventions had been inflicting.”
For this reason, in Hyperpnea Inexperienced, he created a direct relationship between synthetic and pure oxygen producers. “On the prime of the piece, there’s an actual plant, and on the backside, the unreal oxygen machine. The plant controls the exercise of the unreal system,” he explains, noting the way it subtly phases a subverted circle of interdependence between people and nature.
From this primary set up onward, it’s evident that Pandega approaches his apply as a laboratory—turning artwork into open analysis that exams phenomena, recreates them and proposes hybrid alternate options by means of works conceived as hypotheses relatively than mounted statements.
Though the thought and improvement are totally his, the unique blueprint for the concentrator machine got here from scientists and the medical discipline. Pandega tailored and modified it, utilizing the imaginative energy of artwork to reconfigure and problem present scientific methods and official data.
For this reason he describes his do-it-yourself methodology as a “hacker method,” working with acquainted applied sciences and redirecting them to activate mechanical or chemical reactions that generate sound or motion, whereas implying a collaborative company between human presence and the pure entities concerned. “I really feel extra like a hacker—a mechanical hacker. I don’t invent issues; I modify them and push them additional,” he notes, stating that many devices within the exhibition are synthesizers whose capabilities he has remodeled from sonic to mechanical.
Within the adjoining small room, one other set up options an acrylic tank crammed with electrolyte resolution—an aquarium that seems empty however is alive with transformation. Inside, a tree department undergoes steady nickel plating. All through the exhibition, the department slowly accumulates steel, its type shifting over time. A reside feed of the work is projected onto a nickel-containing LED display screen on the SI rooftop, seen from the terrace and the road beneath. Enlarged and flipped the other way up, the rising hydrogen bubbles seem to fall like rain or tears.
Titled Anim Wraksa (2025)—from Kawi, or Previous Javanese, that means “the spirit of the tree”—this work condenses dense symbolism and superior technological processes right into a single alchemical system. On account of at present’s international demand for nickel in batteries for computer systems, telephones and electrical autos, Indonesia—the world’s largest exporter—faces immense ecological injury from nickel extraction, together with deforestation, water air pollution and soil toxicity. These impacts have disrupted not solely environmental situations but additionally the social and non secular material of communities which have lengthy existed in symbiotic relation with their environment.
“Nickel plating is in every single place—in spoons, earrings, something with that silvery end—however the public not often sees the precise course of,” Pandega says. “I needed to amplify that course of and join it with the ecological and mining points in Indonesia.” Right here, the logic of extraction reverses: as a substitute of eradicating nickel, the steel accumulates on the plant. “By the tip of the exhibition, the sculpture modifications form as a result of the plating retains constructing. It’s time-based work, however not human time—one other type of course of, collaborating with pure rhythms.” On this sense, the work encourages viewers to attune to nature’s “deep time,” a durational logic radically totally different from linear, human-centered temporality.
Contemplating these works, even when Pandega by no means states it outright, viewers inevitably recall how Indonesia has been establishing huge new cities—usually ecological catastrophes masked as nationwide progress. Between 2001 and 2024, the nation misplaced 32 million hectares of forest, roughly 20 % of its 2000 forest cowl. The brand new capital Nusantara—rising within the rainforests of East Kalimantan—is the starkest instance: framed as a sensible “forest metropolis,” it’s successfully a synthetic city undertaking carved into one of many world’s most biodiverse areas. Deforestation within the capital zone reached 18,000 hectares between 2018 and 2021, with activists warning that almost half the remaining forest is now threatened by building, mining strain and infrastructure improvement.
Whereas Pandega’s work is just not literal in its tackle of those subjects, he pushes his apply towards political engagement. “I don’t all the time present it immediately, however the concepts are there,” he says. “I’m continuously criticizing authorities insurance policies on nature—mining, land use, all the things.”
Parallel to this critique, lots of Pandega’s works draw on different paradigms past the Western extractive mannequin, recovering extra ritualistic and relational modes of being in reference to nature. In a number of installations, know-how meets ritual and spirituality by means of using conventional devices and their sounds—ancestral applied sciences that embody extra harmonious ecological relations.
One instance is A Diasporic Mythology (2021), a kinetic and sound set up commissioned for the tenth Asia Pacific Triennial. Developed from his analysis into historic narratives and the circulation of devices, it combines Indonesian and Japanese string devices (Taishogoto, Mandaliong, Balinese Penting, Kecapi Sijobang, Lombok Penting) with tea crops and MIDI-sprout sensors that translate plant biodata into sound. The result’s a hybrid refrain articulating the interconnectedness between human and flowers, in addition to the cultural and historic exchanges between Japan and Indonesia.
For Pandega, these works have interaction what might be referred to as “ancestral applied sciences”—tapping into older types and instruments to think about alternate options to modern anthropocentric methods. “My apply isn’t all the time about cutting-edge gadgets. I usually work with mechanical, fundamental methods and blend them with know-how and programming. I don’t wish to present ultra-advanced gadgets only for the sake of it,” he explains. This seek for analog mechanisms, prototypical circuits and evident processes reveals the labor, vulnerability and ingenuity of his DIY methodology, reinforcing artwork as a system of relations relatively than a set object, providing open-ended hypotheses relatively than solutions.
That is additionally evident in Putar Petir Racing Staff (2025), the brand new fee on the second ground—a piece that capabilities as each sculpture and a completely operational electrical bike, totally constructed from scratch. Painted in gleaming purples, pinks and golds, it attracts on the jamet aesthetic—a Javanese-metal avenue model tied to tug racing. A close-by video paperwork a drag race that Pandega organized in Bandung, the place his electrical bike competed towards gasoline-powered fashions. The set up features a customized racing jersey and helmet from a fictitious crew, displayed towards a wall painted within the acquainted inexperienced of modest Indonesian properties.
Right here once more, Pandega presents a staged speculation—an experimental section in an ongoing inquiry. “I like exhibiting unusual potentialities, objects that appear each made and never made,” he notes. Finally, Pandega’s work is research-driven, embracing an open-ended apply of questioning and testing eventualities that’s extra akin to scientific inquiry. “I attempt to hold it open-ended—an abstraction of one thing that exists on this planet, offered as a speculation of another. It’s about how nature and know-how can coexist, how they’ll work collectively to construct one thing higher relatively than destroy one another.”
His apply is a long-term undertaking, one whose outcomes might not emerge for years. But working at this intersection of human mechanics and natural mechanisms stays some of the very important positions from which to acknowledge—and try, by means of the imaginative, disruptive energy of artwork—to rethink the ecological and humanitarian crises produced by our present methods of information, science, politics and know-how.
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