In Conversation with the Artist: Leyla Stevens’ PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest.
Within the heart of the Art Gallery of New South Wales are the tranquil forest movements and yearning laments of Australian-Balinese video artist Leyla Stevens’ recent work, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest 2024. The film, along with a display of rare-pen-and-ink drawings, explores Bali's philosophies and traditional cultures through the dramatic retelling of the Tantri Tales. It weaves through fables in animation, documentary-style explorations and the performance of a Dalang (Indonesian puppeteer), exploring the deep emotional connections between the land and culture as if the film was tracking the moon's cycle.
In chatting about PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest Stevens reveals a deeper interest through her lens-based practice to capture a reconnection to traditional Balinese storytelling traditions through framing these drawings. It reveals these hidden histories of the last colonial period of Bali, working outside the Western gaze to create a holistic and political understanding of key issues such as deforestation and climate change in the scope of Bali’s natural world.
Image credit: Leyla Stevens, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest (video still), 2024 © Leyla Stevens
You mention this connection between the ink drawings as symbols of anthropology and colonial understandings of Bali, as well as them as a tool to reveal hidden histories behind these foreign ideas. Can you expand on this connection?
There's so much scholarship around Bali within the arts, anthropology, cultural studies and literature. But often these forms of knowledge have been produced through a Western lens.
Many artefacts and artworks were produced during Bali's colonial era and later became part of overseas collections, including in Europe and America. Much of my work has been an attempt to rethink how to engage with the Balinese stories, histories, and moments represented in those works outside of the Western logic they've been continually framed by. In PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest, I seek to do this by referencing a group of paintings made by Balinese artists that were commissioned by visiting anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the 1930s and to reanimate them through Balinese traditions of storytelling.
Image credit: Leyla Stevens, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest (video still), 2024, featuring painting by I Dewa Nyoman Dadug Kayunan, Collection R Lemelson (Ex-Mead-Bateson Collection) © Leyla Stevens
Do you think this work achieves that?
I hope my work shows that so-called ‘traditional’ cultures or ancestral practices are also politically and socially engaged. Outside of Bali, Balinese culture often becomes divorced from a global context. For instance, iconic images of gamelan, dances and rice fields can be made to appear very exotic. Somehow, they’re talked about in a very ahistorical and atemporal way. But, of course, they also speak to political and economic histories. They're embedded in all these systems.
I see the political side in the way you also discuss conservation and ecology through these traditional practices and philosophies. You also mentioned in your artist statement that you use these histories to explore more contemporary problems.
For many years, Bali has been experiencing a major environmental crisis, with issues such as mass waste, water pollution, and deforestation. However, when you look at traditional philosophies in Bali, you find a blueprint for a much more holistic approach to caring for and prioritising the environment.
Like it's already there, the philosophy is actually already there.
Image credit: Leyla Stevens, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest (video still), 2024 © Leyla Stevens
In exploring these philosophies through emotion and language, some dialogue has no subtitles, or they came in earlier - was this done on purpose?
A part of me would prefer not to use subtitles at all. I often think that because I work with performance-based collaborators, the emotion of the performance and what they're doing sometimes translates without them. In this case, however, it was important to include subtitles because the script was an important element. Yet there are some moments in the film where I’ve decided not to show the translation immediately and let the audience hear what is said or sung in Balinese first.
At other times, I only briefly keep the translation up. I hope subtle decisions like this allow the audience to be more present with what's happening on the screen.
Do you mean for your works to educate or bring these issues to the forefront, or do you think you mentioned that they're almost lamentations? So, what is that call?
I think it depends on the context in which they're shown
When I show my work in Australia, by default, I adopt the role of educating audiences. It's part of sharing the work and conveying specific histories and meanings. When I show my work in Bali, the focus shifts to more dialogue-based interaction, which affords a more interesting expansion of the work. Because I don’t have to provide so much context, the resulting conversations can focus on connecting and expanding upon the storytelling practices of painting, song and puppetry that are contained in the film.
Image credit: Leyla Stevens, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest (video still), 2024 © Leyla Stevens
Stevens’ role as an artist is ever-changing; bouncing between artist and educator, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest becomes more than a film. The animated sequences of this vital collection of drawings, with their rolling ink waves and violent sequences against man, instantly switch to the performance of the Dalang, whose voice carries a powerful and almost melancholic twang over soundscapes of forest and groves. It’s a collaboration between a fluid understanding and knowing of past practices that is continually evolving while maintaining a strong connection to the spaces and people at the heart of it.
PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest is a meditation that energises the soul to consider not only Bali’s future but also the culturally driven blueprints for managing our natural environment.
PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest is on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Naala Badu building, lower level 2, until the 16th of February 2025.
Co-curated with Artspace, this exhibition is part of the Art Gallery’s Contemporary Projects series, which highlights the work of artists from NSW.
