Artist Bio
Vania Gunarti (born 1992 in Jakarta) graduated with a BFA from the School of Fine Arts, Lasalle School of the Arts, Singapore. Varnia’s works expand across multiple disciplinary, using her body as the motif to challenge psychological states of sexuality within the social perimeters of her upbringing and cultural disparity.

Artist Statement
It’s my body and I will do what I want with it. Something we here in the West take for granted. Despite the information highway’s virulent speed and global intersubjectivity, the female body remains largely uncharted territory within post-colonial Southeast Asian and specifically Malay Archipelago male prejudice. Within the region, ‘The Dominant Male Gaze’ continues to ‘Denounce’ feminine representations despite ever-increasing degrees of transparency and the changing attitudes of the younger generation. The double standard remains, fixed despite the placated promises of politics and nailed to the psyche of acceptability. Indecency is not only a criminal offence in Islam, it is punishable by death under Sharia law. Particularly, when the offender is a woman. Without a reformation, Sharia Law exists in a state of systemic limbic timelessness, no woman has been adjudicated under the Shariat ever. These are the limits of a seemingly open, western hegemonic Indonesian state bureaucracy. A woman may become a doctor, a lawyer, or even a public spokesperson for politics; however, she is determined without a voice or figure regarding her sexuality. She can be sexy and even gratuitously nude for the male gaze but pronounced as insidious, immoral, defamatory and unfit for public view when this very same expression of the patriarchal code of observation first described by Freud in his castration complex is returned by a matriarchal female gaze.

Selected Exhibitions
2023 – Art Jakarta 2023, Redbase, Jakarta, Indonesia
2023 – Aotearoa Art Fair 2023, Redbase, Auckland, New Zealand
2023 – Underline, Redbase Art, Sydney, Australia
2022 – Redbase Diaries #22, Redbase Art, Sydney, Australia
2022 – I’mpulse, Redbase Art, Sydney, Australia
2020 – Nasty Women, Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
2020 – The Armory Show, Gavlak Gallery, New York, USA