Landep
There is a forbidden room in the house, a space not meant for visitors, and at times, not even for the artist herself. Inside, her father keeps his old keris, the traditional Javanese dagger imbued with lineage, mysticism, and memory. Small in scale no longer than a wrist to the tip of a middle finger, the blade carries a presence far greater than its size suggests. Only recently, after a journey to Java, did she discover that the dagger her father guarded so closely was traditionally a woman’s.
Landep unfolds from this intimate fracture within a family. The keris became a quiet but persistent source of tension between her parents, a symbol of belief, pride, secrecy, and difference. What once marked a bitter chapter slowly transforms into a point of return. As memories of her father intertwine with the blade, the work becomes an attempt to bridge distance: between daughter and father, past and present, skepticism and reverence.
Her research-led journey traces the cultural and spiritual lineage of the keris across Surakarta, Salatiga, Yogyakarta, Sumenep, and villages in Bali. At Parangkusumo Beach in Yogyakarta, a place spiritually associated with Javanese cosmology she encounters an unexpected personal connection to her father’s past. Geography becomes biography; tradition becomes inheritance.
In Javanese, landep means “sharp.” The title gestures not only to the physical quality of the blade, but also to perception how we are seen, how we cut through memory, and how we confront the edges of unresolved histories. The project acknowledges the keris not merely as an artifact, but as an active force: one that shapes belief systems, relationships, and fate itself.
Rather than framing the keris solely as a mystical object, Landep meditates on reconciliation. It asks what it means to make peace with complicated legacies to accept that cultural heritage may carry both tenderness and conflict. Every story has its moral; every blade, its edge.
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Language: Bahasa Indonesia & English
Format: Hardcover | 80 pages
Dimensions: 220 x 167mm | 320g
Publication Year: 2024 | First Edition
ISBN: 978-4-909787-00-2
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