BAYANG reimagines The Met’s Kris and Sheath, created in Java or Sumatra during the Banten Sultana...BAYANG reimagines The Met’s Kris and Sheath, created in Java or Sumatra during the Banten Sultana...
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BAYANG reimagines The Met’s Kris and Sheath, created in Java or Sumatra during the Banten Sultanate in the 16th century, as an interactive optical installation.
The original object remains motionless on a dark museum plinth. Above it, a visitor moves and rotates a transparent acrylic card etched with blade-like ornament through a single beam of light. On the textile screen behind it, the kris’s shadow becomes an active archive: pamor lines, intricate carving, terraced forms, and vegetal rhythms gradually emerge and transform inside the silhouette.
The work draws on the visual grammar of Indonesian shadow performance, the lamp, screen, hand, and transformed shadow, without reproducing a specific wayang character. Instead, the shadow serves as an interpretive layer, revealing a world suggested by the kris rather than illustrating its history literally.
I developed the installation through six iterations on the FLORA canvas. The sequence begins with the object waiting before an empty screen, followed by the acrylic card entering the light, the pamor awakening in shadow, the projected geometry shifting, and finally an imagined landscape appearing within the blade. The concluding video uses Seedance 2.0 Reference to demonstrate the physical interaction while preserving the card, kris, lighting, and installation design.
The result explores how a museum object can remain physically unchanged while light, movement, and shadow allow its material memory to take on a new form.
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