Hening: Betty Susiarjo’s Quiet Cosmos of Light, Dust, and Repetition – Fine Art Globe

07 August 2025  •  4 mins read

Betty Susiarjo, The Consistency of Flow, 2025. Nail and thread on wall. Dimension Variable. (Courtesy: Betty Susiarjo).

In her Jakarta solo show, artist Betty Susiarjo transforms silence, shadow, and ephemera into a contemplative visual language rooted in repetition and reverence

In the silent space between light and form, repetition and pause, the work of Betty Susiarjo unfolds like a breath abated. Her upcoming solo exhibition, Hening, curated by Heru Hikayat and opening this weekend at CGArtspace in Jakarta, emerges from a practice steeped in tactility, time, and quiet devotion—a poetics of near-invisibility.

The Indonesian-born, Jerusalem-based artist has long navigated between worlds, from her early studies in Indonesia to formal art training in Singapore and the UK, and through residencies in Mexico, Japan, Venice, and Yogyakarta. Each context has informed her work, not as narrative but as atmosphere. And yet, her art resists geography. What it seeks instead is a metaphysical register, a way of translating silence, dust, light, and shadow into visual form.

Teaching, too, has informed her process. “University students are searching,” she reflects. “They have a kind of purity. They remind me why I started.” In group exhibitions, she finds perspective. In solo shows, she finds measure. Hening arrives at such a moment of measure: an artist quietly re-encountering herself, between borders and forms.

Betty Susiarjo, “A Dazzling Grey,” 2019. Videos on silk. Dimension Variable. (Courtesy: Betty Susiarjo).

“Hening,” she explains, “is a word in Indonesian that has no precise English equivalent. It means to choose silence. Not absence, but a purposeful stillness.” It is this tension—between seeing and sensing, between form and its essence—that animates the new works. Two videos anchor the show: Dust, a recent recording of particles rising from a shaken blanket and falling again into stillness; and A Dazzling Grey, an earlier meditation on light and ephemerality. Alongside them are her latest works on paper: constellations of hand-placed dots, stitched, glued, or drawn, one by one, a form of repetitive care that is at once meditative and monumental.

The works on paper in Hening trace a tactile cosmology—each formed through the careful accumulation of washi paper stickers, layered onto blank fields with precision. Titles like Sunlight, Moonlight, Starlight, and Earthlight suggest a celestial mapping, where repetition becomes a way of naming the ungraspable. In The Beginning of Graceful Verticality, columns of dots rise gently across the page, like smoke drawn upwards. Evenings, a nine-part set, evokes the fading hues of twilight with its muted surfaces and serial rhythm. The scale remains intimate, yet the gesture is expansive: each small act of placement marks a moment in time, a quiet index of attention.

Betty Susiarjo, “Graceful Verticality,” 2025. Dot stickers on paper, 27.5 cm x 21 cm (each). (Courtesy: Betty Susiarjo).

One of the most evocative pieces, That Which is Mortal is Time. We are Forever, stretches horizontally with a field of gentle punctuations—a quiet unfolding of presence across space. Similarly, The Scent of Rain on Sand conjures the ephemeral touch of memory, where sensation and atmosphere fuse in abstraction. These works do not illustrate their titles but resonate with them, echoing the emotional afterimage of the words.

Repetition, for Susiarjo, is not a simple act of meditation. Its purpose is not decorative but temporal. “It’s a kind of balancing,” she says, “a way to quiet the overstimulated world. When I repeat a gesture—a dot, a stitch, a bead—I enter a different rhythm. It liberates the mind.” That rhythm, pulsing gently beneath the surface of her works, recalls devotional labor, but without dogma. It is closer to a breathing practice: invisible, vital, and deeply felt.

Betty Susiarjo, “Anemones,” 2011. Glitters, Hama beads, speakers, sound. Dimensions variable. (

Her earlier installation, Anemones (2010), with glittering speakers and the recorded rhythm of ocean waves, offered a blueprint for this logic of immersion. So too did The Consistency of Flow (2003), also in a current show, a wall piece that featured thread and shadows working together in slow motion. Throughout her practice, Susiarjo has moved across various media—sound, fabric, paper, plastic, and light—but her concerns remain constant: the unseen, the unfixed, and the subtly sacred.

This intention is sharpened by war. Reflecting on her life in Jerusalem during a time of war, she spoke to me of trembling wood, the soundless quiver of nearby explosions, of “something not seen, but felt.” In Dust, particles float briefly through a shaft of light—cosmic and mundane, stardust and household residue. “As artists,” she says, “we’re always trying to keep dust away. But dust is everything. It settles on our lives, invisibly. I suppose living in a situation of war makes me think of dust as a metaphor for destruction. Or some kind of impermanence: like our mortality, perhaps.”

Something in Susiarjo’s quiet approach—her devotion to the ephemeral, her insistence on perceptual distance—reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s evocation of an artwork’s aura: “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of a distance, no matter how close it may be.” Her installations and videos hum with this peculiar proximity—intimate yet ungraspable, quiet yet charged. Her materials come from the everyday, but the way she places them creates a distance through which the ordinary is transfigured.

Her method remains intuitive. Materials: sticker dots, fabric scraps, beads—small parts, gathered like thoughts. What unites them is scale. “I love taking something small,” she says, “and making it bigger. From micro to macro. Like a cosmos assembled bead by bead.” There is no strict hierarchy in her materials—only an ethic of attention, a reverence for the overlooked.

Hening invites the viewer to slow down, to stand still, and to listen to the almost nothing. And in that pause, something expands—like dust, like breath, like the space between two dots that form a line.

Published by: Fine Art Global
Written by: Marianna Rosen
Originally published in Fine Art Global website on 07 May 2025
https://fineartglobe.com/artists/hening-betty-susiarjos-quiet-cosmos-of-light-dust-and-repetition/