The exhibition is led by Bandana Tewari as lead curator, with Brina Paska as assistant curator, and brings together artists, designers, and studios from Indonesia and India.
Art & Bali, presented by Nuanu Creative City, announces the 21 participating artists, designers, and studios for its 2026 Annual Curated Exhibition, What the Body Remembers. Led by Bandana Tewari as Lead Curator with Brina Paska as Assistant Curator, the exhibition opens on 11 September 2026 at Labyrinth Art Gallery, in parallel with Art & Bali 2026, which runs across Nuanu Creative City from 11–13 September 2026. The exhibition will remain on view until 29 November 2026.
Bringing together practices across craft, textile, design, fashion, contemporary art, and material culture, What the Body Remembers is shaped by two curatorial anchors: Hand as Archive: Memory, Transmission, and Embodied Knowledge and Routes of Exchange: Migration, Mutation, and Becoming. Through these frameworks, the exhibition traces how cultural knowledge is carried through touch, repetition, apprenticeship, inherited technique, material intelligence, and exchange.
The 21 participating artists, designers, and studios are 11.11 / eleven eleven (India); A. Sebastianus (Indonesia); Ateev Anand from re-ceremonial (India); Ayni (India / Indonesia); Chanakya School (India); Cinta Bumi Artisans (Indonesia); Gaurav Gupta (India); Hiddenland (India); Iyonono (Indonesia); Kita Bisa Design (Indonesia); Lulu Lutfi Labibi (Indonesia); Morii Design (India); Princess Pea (India); Raw Mango x Sanjay Garg (India); Sakde Oka (Indonesia); Sarita Ibnoe (Indonesia); Setia Cap Cili (Indonesia / Bali); Studio Jeje (Indonesia); TANGAN Privé (Indonesia); Tex Saverio (Indonesia); and TOTON The Label (Indonesia).
Across couture, embroidery, weaving, botanical dyeing, slow fashion, ritual, material research, women-led artisan networks, and community-based production, the selected practices examine the hand as a site of memory, discipline, inheritance, and transformation. The emphasis on Indonesia and India reflects the curators’ interest in connected geographies of craft and material knowledge, from Balinese ikat and Indonesian textile experimentation to Indian couture, embroidery, and slow fashion.
This exhibition begins with memory carried in the body — in the gesture of the hand, the rhythm of repetition, and the intelligence of touch,” said Bandana Tewari, Lead Curator of the Annual Curated Exhibition. “It gathers practices where craft is not simply made but remembered – through textile, fashion, and design that hold stories of movement, devotion, labour, and belonging. Bali becomes a meaningful ground for this dialogue, where the act of making still breathes through ritual, community, and the continuity of ancestral knowledge.
Presented within Labyrinth Art Gallery at Nuanu Creative City, the exhibition sits within a wider fair programme that includes gallery presentations, public talks, performances, installations, and site-responsive programming. Nuanu Creative City, the founding and presenting partner of Art & Bali, provides the cultural infrastructure for the fair across its 44-hectare site, bringing together exhibition spaces, public areas, performance venues, hospitality, education, and long-term creative programming.
“This exhibition is important to us because it refuses to separate art, fashion, craft and design into neat categories,” said Kelsang Dolma, director of Art & Bali. “Many of the practices in What the Body Remembers come from long, demanding relationships with material, skill, labour and community. Under the curatorial direction of Bandana Tewari and Brina Paska, the exhibition brings Indian and Indonesian practitioners into a conversation that feels precise, layered and necessary for Art & Bali. It also reflects Nuanu Creative City’s ambition to create space for cross-disciplinary cultural exchange and long-term creative dialogue within the region.”
Further details on participating galleries, programme highlights, VIP events, and ticketing will be announced in the coming months.