Kurnia Ngayuga Wibowo, known as yugaknow (b. 1997), is a mixed media artist born in Cirebon, Indonesia, whose practice is rooted in photography and moving images. He incorporates domestic objects into the physical body of his works, using photography and moving images as representations of reality that he seeks to intervene in. His work examines the paradoxical relationship between myth, history and urban society in Cirebon.
In Notes From the River: Tales of Kriyan, a video and found-object installation, he draws on Cirebon's legend of a white crocodile in the Kriyan River, said to be the transformed spirit of a son of Sultan Sepuh Syamsudin Matawijaya I who disobeyed his parents. The work comments on the pollution of the city's rivers, using the performative method of trance possession, or kesurupan, to voice the threatened crocodile's anxieties.In Memory Lane, he uses self-portraiture and mixed media to construct a fictional narrative around Admiral Cheng Ho, the Ming-dynasty diplomat who visited Cirebon six hundred years earlier and whose memory has faded from the city's collective history.
In 2022 he presented the solo exhibition “Privacy Piracy” at RWD Gallery in Bandung, growing out of a self-critique of the street photography he had practiced for more than five years.For the work he stitched thread into his prints as an act meant to mend what he considered ethically problematic about his own street photography practice.,In 2023 his solo exhibition “Something Lost Into The Water”, supported by an Arttaca x Bandung Photography Month grant, took the form of a site-specific installation in a public space during Bandung Photography Month.The work reflects on being asked by his parents to bathe in holy water to cleanse perceived impurities, and on how that experience of family belief and tradition shaped his identity.
