Slinat has been around for a while — those in Bali will know his street pieces: stencil-like, bold, sometimes funny, sometimes unsettling. He’s long been circling the same set of questions — what happens when ritual becomes a front? When culture becomes commodity? When the island gets sold back to itself as an image, and people start to believe in it?

This new show – his first since a pause for fatherhood — seems like a conceptual deepening of these notions. The same concerns are here: tourism, environment, the hyper-performance of tradition. But the tone feels heavier, more direct, more urgent. For most of the works, including paper glue-ons and cardboard cutouts, the artist is working with Chinese ink on paper, stained with tobacco-infused water that leaves a kind of aged, sepia hue. We spoke with the artist after I walked through, and it was clear he’s still turning over the same stones – but now with a sense that the pressure has only intensified. In this body of work exhibited at TAT gallery, Slinat looking at Balinese ritual. Not as an outsider (like me) might - with awe or exoticism, but from the inside — with discomfort and a knowing critique. He talks about the underlying belief that ritual can be a fix-all. That whatever happens, there’s a ceremony for it. But he’s wary of where that leads. “People skip medical treatment because they think an offering will solve it,” he says. “Sometimes ritual becomes an excuse not to think.”

And this is where things get complicated for me. As a Westerner in Bali, I’ve seen so many people try to escape their own systems – capitalism, individualism, endless productivity — and find something “real” here. Balinese way of life is seen as an ultimate refuge. But Slinat flips that — pointing out how much of it is deeply material: the spending, the ceremonies, the competition over offerings, the constant rebuilding of temples to make them look newer, more perfect. The spirituality, he suggests, is often less internal than it appears. Or at least, it’s caught in a tangle — between genuine belief and performative obligation.

There’s a cut-out in the show of three suited figures with chimneys for heads — a clear nod to authority. Not traditional, spiritual authority necessarily, but the kind that burns through resources, that imposes, that wants people obedient and uninformed. That brings money to the temples and dictates how temples should operate.

Several figures in the works, including a wall-high figure of a young Balinese woman mid-offering – have faces rendered with an optical distortion that makes it appear as though there are three faces at once. It’s uncanny, and not in a good way. It’s not a reference to Hindu deities as I initially assumed. When I asked him, Slinat clarified — “No, it’s not about gods. It’s the conflict of the real life not matching the ritual. Outside the ceremony, things are different, difficult, raw.”

Searching for resolution, I asked the artist if he wanted to see his children carry on the traditional rituals. He paused. “I wouldn’t make them,” he said. “I wish society stopped putting pressures too… But maybe sometimes… I’d still want them to.” That hesitation touched me. To me, it’s was a painful example of how we become conflicted about our own culture when it’s no longer only ours, when it becomes a tool of authority — wrapped up in politics, control, and spectacle. There’s a tragedy in that. Not because the culture is lost, but because it’s used.

The exhibition doesn’t feel like a resolution. And that’s the strength of it. It doesn’t tell you exactly what to believe. It just sits in the tension — between tradition and exhaustion, beauty and burden, reverence and critique.

— Natasha Doroshenko Murray