Curator’s Note: Echoes in the Grain

Alena Murang’s visual works unfurl like whispered songs from the forest: fragmented, fervent, and deeply rooted. As a keeper of memory and rhythm, her canvases mirror the spirit of her music: reverent of tradition, yet unafraid of improvisation. There is no single visual language here. Instead, we move through elemental abstraction, poetic portraiture, and intricate pattern; a vocabulary formed by earth, fire, and ceremony.

To witness this collection is to engage with a body remembering itself: a skull etched beside a temple offering; a woman’s profile painted like a woven heirloom; swirling topographies recalling both bark and fingerprint, root and echo. Each piece holds within it a reverberation, like a past voice vibrating in the now.

What threads the works together is a pulse: ancestral, electric, and embodied. Whether painting in bold strokes of copper and soot, or sculpting silence into negative space, Murang renders the liminal visible. Her gestures are as deliberate as they are intuitive, each mark a negotiation between seen and unseen, lineage and longing.

In a time when culture is often commodified or flattened, Murang’s art insists on texture. On ceremony. On remembering. These are not just paintings; they are portals. Each one asks us not just to look, but to listen, to the winds through Bornean highlands, to the voice of a girl picking up the sape’, to the grandmother's breath as it travels through time.

Here, art becomes more than expression. It becomes return.