“When I moved to Bali 10 years ago, I didn’t carry my Chanel or Dior bags, but I did carry my grandmother’s and mother’s saris,” shares Bandana Tewari, the journalist and sustainability advocate who has made Bali her home since over a decade. Tewari tunes into our Zoom call from sunny Nuanu, a mini city on the island dedicated to the creative arts, as she prepares for Art & Bali’s flagship exhibition, What the Body Remembers, with assistant curator Brina Paska.
The show brings together 26 artists, designers, and creative practices from Indonesia and India, using the body as a point of departure to explore memory, identity, cultural knowledge, and acts of making. In the exhibition, her cherished heirlooms will be displayed alongside custom creations by Indian brands, including Raw Mango, Gaurav Gupta, and Re-Ceremonial, as well as Indonesian labels like Toton and Tagan Privé. “What the Body Remembers is a tribute to my mother. For what does the body remember if not touch? The weight of silk against the skin. The rustle of a sari as someone walks away. Over her lifetime, she gathered them slowly: the luminous gold of muga silk, the sacred geometry of patola, the grandeur of Kanjivaram,” she says.
Alluding to the exhibition, which explores the crossover of craft between India and Indonesia, Tewari points to the remarkable parallels between the textile traditions of the two countries, particularly ikat. In Odisha, she notes, the annual Bali Jatra commemorates the historic journeys of ships carrying spices, textiles, ideas, and philosophies towards Indonesia and beyond. Even more strikingly, double ikat survives in only three places in the world: Bali, Patan in Gujarat, and Japan. “These are the threads of life,” she says. “They’re like little rivers that crisscross across regions and different people and ideologies. But ultimately, they bind us together.”
Tewari’s curatorial approach is consequently less about presenting craft as an aesthetic category and more about examining the ecosystems that sustain it. She makes a distinction between “extraction” and “immersion”—taking a beautiful weave out of its context versus working with the communities that have carried that knowledge forward. “You don’t treat them as manufacturing units, because a craft wouldn’t exist if that village didn’t exist,” she says. For her, understanding craft means understanding the village economy, the community, and the ecology around it—a relationship she sees as deeply Gandhian.
“I don’t want the chin-scratching critic to be the only audience,” she quips when I ask her what she hopes visitors will take away from the exhibition. “Sustainability has become a bogus word. Instead of talking about how fast fashion is horrible, I’d like to flip the narrative so I can show you the happier side of what buying good things means. If I can have kids walk into an exhibition and have a sense of awe and wonder, for me that’s an achievement.”
Below, Tewari’s guide to experiencing Bali like a local:
A local eatery you’d happily return to
“Forget Canggu’s smoothie bowls. On a dusty corner of Padang Linjong, Bu Sri and her husband serve Java on a plate. At Warung Jawa Bu Sri, Batu Mejan, there are no menu theatrics, just a glass cabinet of 15 home-cooked dishes: jackfruit gulai, smoky mangut lele, crisp tempeh, and ayam curry that tastes like grandmother’s kitchen, among others. In the same warung (local dhaba), you can buy sustainable Indosole flip-flops made from recycled tyres.”
Address: Jl Canggu Padang Linjong No 15a, Canggu, Kec Kuta Utara, Kabupaten Badung, Bali. Open Monday to Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm
A Balinese dish more people should know about
“Everyone comes for babi guling (roast suckling pig), but lawar is the real Bali dish. It’s not one dish—it’s a method. Finely chopped jackfruit or banana stem, green beans and grated coconut come on a rich base of genep spices (shallot, garlic, galangal, turmeric, chilli, shrimp paste) tossed with minced meat. It’s the backbone of every sacred ceremony. No lawar, no holy offering.”
