Indonesian Contemporary Art and Design (ICAD) 16 Invites you to submit your concept with a focus on the theme “Being: Becoming”.

The works in Being: Becoming are driven by a temporal framework and its context. The theme opens up conversations around progression, possibilities, and shifts while also critically thinking about the freedoms, constraints, and negotiations that are embedded in our current state of being and the process of becoming. At the same time, it carries the weight of permanence–the desire to hold on to what might otherwise disperse through time. In this sense, it challenges the notion of time, or rather, it confuses both progression and nostalgia.

In the process of becoming, the psychological response to preservation grows stronger. Acts such as documenting, archiving, recording, and preserving fragments of experience emerge as ways to momentarily hold time in place, against the inevitable nature of becoming.

The conditions of becoming are never neutral. Even at the level of individuals, they are shaped by geopolitical realities. Colonial and postcolonial relations inform the knowledge we inherit; wars redraw borders and migrations negotiate our identities. In everyday life, humans navigate an algorithm-defined environment, and more-than-humans grapple with ecological imbalances.Within such conditions, being itself becomes a contested state.

While dominant epistemic centres often frame becoming as a structured and traceable process–commonly characterised by structure and institution– the experience of being in the global south remains fluid and difficult to pinpoint as one singular process. Communities have long known hybrid conditions; layered histories, overlapping belief systems, informal economies, and collective forms of organisation.

In Jakarta where the exhibition takes place, identity never really arrived at a fixed point. To be is to have overcome many improvisations and adaptations. Our understanding of space, value, and aesthetics thus mimic this. Vernacular design solutions, adaptive reuse, and the grassroots artistic practices rely less on institutional validations and more on values of networks and survival. Within such context, art and design emerge as methods for thinking and surviving constraints, all through small acts of adjustment and resistance. No matter how small the act of intervention, materials and objects would naturally safeguard forms of knowledge, memory, and collective imagination, inherent of a non-conforming way of becoming.

Throughout history, artistic practice has served as a tool to address, contemplate, support or critique the cultural climate—the zeitgeist. The Dada movement of the 1910s used satire to challenge the status quo, particularly against the First World War. Decades later, the Actionism movement of the 1960s spoke out against violence of humanity through performance and body art.

On a more contemporary level, speculative art and design emerge from present struggles, making space for people to envision alternative futures. In a more local context, Southeast Asian art practices have been adapting and making do through hybrid identities which combine the mainstream and the alternative systems. Through socially engaged art, artists put forward collective actions and dialogue to create resistance against the uncertain global and local condition.

This 16th edition is open to participants from diverse backgrounds—art, design, music, science, ecology, architecture, and beyond. Yet, the curatorial team seeks those who creatively engage with the idea of speculation, time, and our current world climate in its complex sense. Being: Becoming offers a space to reflect on where we stand–and to imagine what we might become, both individually and collectively.