Live at Movingpoets NOVILLA (2026). Photos by Hani Hamza
|
|
Live at SPORE initiative (2026). Photos by Jetmir Idrizi
HANOMANN_O! is one of the artistic personas of Berlin and Bandung based artist Ariel William Orah. Conceived as an evolving artistic research interface, the project investigates questions of migration, identity, memory, extraction, trust, and coexistence through sound, performance, installation, moving image, writing, and speculative storytelling. Rather than existing as a fixed fictional character or solely as a musical alter ego, HANOMANN_O! operates as a mutable companion through which artistic, curatorial, and research inquiries unfold across multiple formats and contexts.
The project emerged from Orah's long term artistic practice with sōydivision and continues to evolve through the curatorial research initiative TRUSTPICTION (2025–2027), which explores how trust and suspicion are negotiated within diasporic realities amid overlapping social, political, ecological, and technological crises. HANOMANN_O! functions both as a research methodology and a world building device, transforming contemporary anxieties into spaces for reflection, humor, imagination, and collective dialogue.
The name combines Hanoman, the monkey hero central to Indonesian interpretations of the Ramayana, with the German expression "Mann, oh!", forming a hybrid identity shaped by migration, translation, and productive misalignment. The project is further inspired by the centuries long movement of monkey mythologies across Asia, where stories, religions, and cultural imaginaries travelled between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Drawing resonance from Hanoman, Sun Wukong, Buddhist monkey tales, and regional folklore, HANOMANN_O! does not merge these traditions into a single mythology. Instead, the project inhabits the spaces where these narratives intersect, diverge, and continue to transform through cultural exchange. Like diasporic identities themselves, HANOMANN_O! is imagined as a living archive of continuous translation, never fixed and always evolving through encounters, misunderstandings, and adaptation. In this sense, the project follows the migration of myths as much as the migration of people.
Drawing inspiration from dangdut and Sundanese kasidahan, genres that shaped Orah's upbringing in Bandung, West Java during the 1980s and 1990s, HANOMANN_O! develops a sonic language where melancholic vocal lines, minor key serenades, traditional polyrhythmic structures, Sundanese musical sensibilities, and experimental electronic production converge. Music, however, represents only one manifestation of the project alongside lecture performances, installations, radio works, exhibitions, moving image, and writing.
HANOMANN_O! was first introduced publicly through the lecture performance Subdued Residues, presented at the Burning Silence Symposium: Art and Climate Injustice at Spore Initiative in Berlin. The project subsequently expanded into audiovisual live performances at Terrarium in Toronto and Art Is Everywhere Festival in Guelph, while continuing to develop through installations, exhibitions, and collaborative artistic research. Current iterations include new works for the group exhibition ALI(E/A)NSI in Berlin Schöneweide, alongside the production of the debut EP Diaspora Drama & Euphoria, scheduled for release in late 2026.
Rather than seeking a singular origin or stable identity, HANOMANN_O! embraces hybridity as an artistic method. The project approaches mythology not as a fixed inheritance but as a living migratory archive, continuously rewritten through movement, translation, and encounters across time, geography, and culture.
The project emerged from Orah's long term artistic practice with sōydivision and continues to evolve through the curatorial research initiative TRUSTPICTION (2025–2027), which explores how trust and suspicion are negotiated within diasporic realities amid overlapping social, political, ecological, and technological crises. HANOMANN_O! functions both as a research methodology and a world building device, transforming contemporary anxieties into spaces for reflection, humor, imagination, and collective dialogue.
The name combines Hanoman, the monkey hero central to Indonesian interpretations of the Ramayana, with the German expression "Mann, oh!", forming a hybrid identity shaped by migration, translation, and productive misalignment. The project is further inspired by the centuries long movement of monkey mythologies across Asia, where stories, religions, and cultural imaginaries travelled between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Drawing resonance from Hanoman, Sun Wukong, Buddhist monkey tales, and regional folklore, HANOMANN_O! does not merge these traditions into a single mythology. Instead, the project inhabits the spaces where these narratives intersect, diverge, and continue to transform through cultural exchange. Like diasporic identities themselves, HANOMANN_O! is imagined as a living archive of continuous translation, never fixed and always evolving through encounters, misunderstandings, and adaptation. In this sense, the project follows the migration of myths as much as the migration of people.
Drawing inspiration from dangdut and Sundanese kasidahan, genres that shaped Orah's upbringing in Bandung, West Java during the 1980s and 1990s, HANOMANN_O! develops a sonic language where melancholic vocal lines, minor key serenades, traditional polyrhythmic structures, Sundanese musical sensibilities, and experimental electronic production converge. Music, however, represents only one manifestation of the project alongside lecture performances, installations, radio works, exhibitions, moving image, and writing.
HANOMANN_O! was first introduced publicly through the lecture performance Subdued Residues, presented at the Burning Silence Symposium: Art and Climate Injustice at Spore Initiative in Berlin. The project subsequently expanded into audiovisual live performances at Terrarium in Toronto and Art Is Everywhere Festival in Guelph, while continuing to develop through installations, exhibitions, and collaborative artistic research. Current iterations include new works for the group exhibition ALI(E/A)NSI in Berlin Schöneweide, alongside the production of the debut EP Diaspora Drama & Euphoria, scheduled for release in late 2026.
Rather than seeking a singular origin or stable identity, HANOMANN_O! embraces hybridity as an artistic method. The project approaches mythology not as a fixed inheritance but as a living migratory archive, continuously rewritten through movement, translation, and encounters across time, geography, and culture.
|
|
Live at SPORE initiative (2026). Photos by Jetmir Idrizi
Live at Movingpoets NOVILLA (2026). Photos by Hani Hamza
|
|
|
|
|
Live at Cinematheque Leipzig (2025). Photos by Anna Perepechai
JIKALAU
JIKALAU. Text (2024), part of the composition of the same title, contribution for by Struma+Iodine Sonic Agency. Video art (2025), part of CORPUS NEUTRUM, a multimedia performance and installation commissioned by Moving Poets e.V., supported by Bezirksamt Treptow-Köpenick, Fachbereich Kultur und Museen. Video art karaoke (2026), part of SUBDUED RESIDUE, commissioned by Burning Silence – Symposium for Sonic Arts and Ecologies at SPORE Initiative, supported by the European Union.
|
|
|
JIKALAU began as a text written in 2024 as part of my contribution to Struma+Iodine Sonic Agency, drawing from fragments of poetry and collected sonic archives. One of its starting points was a personal reflection after being invited to documenta fifteen, arriving in Kassel one day after the controversy surrounding Taring Padi and accusations of antisemitic imagery in a mural. As an Indonesian artist witnessing an Indonesian collective and an Indonesian-curated edition of Documenta at the center of an international rupture, the moment became a catalyst for reflecting on identity, responsibility, representation, and the fractures of global discourse. These questions later merged with the wider polycrisis of the present era: the aftershocks of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the events of 7 October 2023 and their repercussions, and the ongoing collapse of trust across media and politics.
In 2025, the text transformed into a dangdut-inspired song composition as part of CORPUS NEUTRUM, a multimedia performance and installation commissioned by Moving Poets e.V.. A second iteration appeared as a karaoke video work for Burning Silence – Symposium for Sonic Arts and Ecologies at SPORE Initiative, accompanying my lecture performance Subdued Residue, which explored extractive economies through the lens of sound art and ecology, and through my diasporic Indonesian perspective tracing histories from colonial nutmeg plantations to contemporary nickel mining.
composition with the same title (2024). Released by LKW (Berlin) and part of Struma Iodine Sonic Agency (Vienna)
Curiga Percaya
CURIGA PERCAYA (Suspicion / Trust) explores the unstable relationship between doubt, belief, and coexistence in an age shaped by ongoing crisis.
The first iteration of CURIGA PERCAYA was created in 2025 as part of the sōydivision performance repertoire Empathy Supper, presented through the work Berdikari (Berdiri Di Atas Kaki Sendiri), commissioned by curatorial collective Mouth Archive, and presented at Cinémathèque Leipzig. Empathy Supper uses food as a medium for artistic research, social encounter, and collective reflection, where shared meals become both empathy interface and social lubricant. Within this context, the dangdut-based composition emerged as a karaoke video work carrying the title CURIGA PERCAYA, reflecting the tension between intimacy and mistrust, solidarity and paranoia, closeness and distance.
The phrase later evolved into TRUSTPICTION, the curatorial framework of sōydivision from 2025 to 2027, examining the dialectic between trust and suspicion within the present polycrisis, especially through diasporic perspectives in Germany. In this sense, the song became one of the earliest artistic responses to that research trajectory, asking how new forms of relation can still be built amid fractured realities. A further iteration (below) was developed as a ZINE submission for Arts Everywhere Festival in Guelph (scheduled May 2026), where it reappears within an Empathy Supper performance titled Trustpictions: Exploring the New Ecologies of Trust.
The first iteration of CURIGA PERCAYA was created in 2025 as part of the sōydivision performance repertoire Empathy Supper, presented through the work Berdikari (Berdiri Di Atas Kaki Sendiri), commissioned by curatorial collective Mouth Archive, and presented at Cinémathèque Leipzig. Empathy Supper uses food as a medium for artistic research, social encounter, and collective reflection, where shared meals become both empathy interface and social lubricant. Within this context, the dangdut-based composition emerged as a karaoke video work carrying the title CURIGA PERCAYA, reflecting the tension between intimacy and mistrust, solidarity and paranoia, closeness and distance.
The phrase later evolved into TRUSTPICTION, the curatorial framework of sōydivision from 2025 to 2027, examining the dialectic between trust and suspicion within the present polycrisis, especially through diasporic perspectives in Germany. In this sense, the song became one of the earliest artistic responses to that research trajectory, asking how new forms of relation can still be built amid fractured realities. A further iteration (below) was developed as a ZINE submission for Arts Everywhere Festival in Guelph (scheduled May 2026), where it reappears within an Empathy Supper performance titled Trustpictions: Exploring the New Ecologies of Trust.
Zine contributions for Art is Everywhere
|
|
Subdued Residue
This essay was originally presented at the Burning Silence Symposium for Art and Climate Justice and is now published as part of its accompanying publication. Written from my position as an Indonesian artist and researcher living in Berlin, it reflects an ongoing attempt to understand how environmental crises cannot be separated from the political and economic histories that continue to shape them. Rather than approaching climate justice solely through ecological discourse, the text traces how colonialism, Cold War geopolitics, extractive development, and global systems of capital continue to reverberate across landscapes, bodies, and memory.
Structured through the ADSR envelope of electronic sound synthesis—Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release--Subdued Residue: Listening After Geneva (1967) proposes listening as a method for reading history. It asks how certain political moments become amplified while others are absorbed into silence, and how the consequences of decisions made decades ago continue to unfold as contemporary climate emergencies. The essay forms part of my long-term artistic research project EXTRA K↔K LANG, where sound becomes both a conceptual framework and a way of sensing the lingering frequencies of extraction, displacement, and uneven development.
Structured through the ADSR envelope of electronic sound synthesis—Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release--Subdued Residue: Listening After Geneva (1967) proposes listening as a method for reading history. It asks how certain political moments become amplified while others are absorbed into silence, and how the consequences of decisions made decades ago continue to unfold as contemporary climate emergencies. The essay forms part of my long-term artistic research project EXTRA K↔K LANG, where sound becomes both a conceptual framework and a way of sensing the lingering frequencies of extraction, displacement, and uneven development.
