hot art bali: Rivers in Ceremony, Art in Support of Sungai Watch
This September, art and environmental action meet at SUN.CONTEMPORARY PROJECTS in Pererenan for Rivers in Ceremony, the second annual Sungai Watch charity exhibition.
Curated by artist and SUN.CONTEMPORARY founder Ricky Lee Gordon, the exhibition brings together artists from Indonesia and around the world in support of Sungai Watch’s mission to stop plastic pollution from reaching the ocean.
Last year, the exhibition community helped raise US$13,000 for Sungai Watch’s river-cleanup work across Bali. This year, SUN.CONTEMPORARY hopes to build on that generosity—using art to help protect the waterways that connect Bali’s communities, landscapes and ocean.
Opening night and VIP preview
The exhibition opens on Thursday, 10 September 2026.
An invitation-based VIP preview and walkabout will take place from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. with Sungai Watch founders Gary, Kelly and Sam Bencheghib. The public opening follows from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.
The exhibition will continue over the coming months and can be visited Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Location: SUN.CONTEMPORARY PROJECTS, Jl. Pantai Pererenan 133B, Pererenan, Bali 80351
VIP preview: 5:00–6:00 p.m.; RSVP required
Public opening: 6:00–9:00 p.m.
Regular hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
For the exhibition catalogue, RSVP details and further information, visit SUN.CONTEMPORARY’s Rivers in Ceremony page.
About Sungai Watch
Gary, Kelly and Sam Bencheghib
Sungai Watch is an environmental organisation founded in Bali in 2020 by siblings Gary, Kelly and Sam Bencheghib. Its mission is to prevent plastic waste from travelling through rivers and entering the ocean.
Today, more than 180 “river warriors” work across its operations. Sungai Watch maps pollution sources, installs simple floating trash barriers, cleans rivers and illegal dumping sites, and sorts collected waste into more than 30 material categories. The organisation also works with communities, schools, businesses and government bodies to address pollution at its source.
Its sister initiative, Sungai Design, gives difficult-to-recycle river plastic a new life as durable furniture and design objects—demonstrating that discarded material can become a valuable resource.
About curator Ricky Lee Gordon
Born in Johannesburg in 1984 and now based in Bali, Ricky Lee Gordon is an artist, curator and the founder of SUN.CONTEMPORARY PROJECTS. His studio practice uses natural materials including indigo, charcoal, plant dyes and rock pigments to create landscapes that reflect on water, memory and the interconnectedness of life.
Gordon is also known internationally for large-scale public artworks addressing social and environmental issues, including projects for Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the United Nations. He founded SUN.CONTEMPORARY in 2024 as an artist-led space for exhibitions, residencies, workshops and cross-cultural exchange.
For Rivers in Ceremony, his roles as artist and curator come together in an exhibition shaped by collaboration, ecological responsibility and the idea that culture can inspire tangible action.
installation shots at SUN.CONTEMPORARY
Participating artists
A.Jasmine is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, graphic design and digital media. Her work uses experimental mark-making and landscape to explore memory, impermanence and emotionally charged spaces between the familiar and unknown.
Aaron Glasson is a New Zealand-born multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, murals, film, architecture and participatory installations. His geometric visual language is informed by close observation of wilderness and natural systems.
Abyu Amanda Aldi is an Indonesian painter born in Panyabungan, North Sumatra, in 1998. A graduate of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta, he transforms social tensions and disruptive events from his surroundings into layered, expressive paintings.
Alexander Sebastianus Hartanto, also known as A. Sebastianus, is an Indonesian artist, weaver and ethnographic researcher. Drawing on Javanese textile traditions and ancestral knowledge, his work considers ritual, material culture, memory and the place of craft within contemporary art.
Alexia Vogel is a South African painter based in Berlin. Moving between abstraction and figuration, she creates dreamlike landscapes in which colour, gesture, recollection and imagination seem to dissolve into one another.
Aleph Geddis is an American-born sculptor based in Bali. Working principally with wood and ceramics, he brings traditional carving into dialogue with geometric and modernist forms inspired by natural structures and Platonic solids.
Andy Dewantoro is an Indonesian painter born in Tanjung Karang in 1973. Known for cinematic, often unpopulated landscapes, he uses architecture, light and atmospheric colour to evoke memory, solitude and the changing relationship between nature and the built environment.
Fa’ Pawaka, also known as Fahrani Empel or Favelamunk, is a Berlin-based Indonesian multidisciplinary artist. Her current practice centres on sound, spatial experience and ritual, exploring listening as a means of transformation, connection and healing.
Filippo Sciascia is a Sicilian-born artist who has lived and worked in Bali since the late 1990s. His painting, sculpture and installation practice investigates the connections between art, science, technology, anthropology and nature, with light acting as a recurring conceptual thread.
Gigih Prayogo
The River Within II
2026
60 x 45 cm
Acrylic on Canvas
Gigih Prayogo is a Yogyakarta-based artist and writer working primarily in painting. His contemporary compositions use acrylic and a direct visual language to turn personal reflection and observations of everyday life into poetic images.
Ines Katamso is a French-Indonesian artist based in Bali whose work exists at the intersection of ecology, culture and myth. Using soil pigments, recycled plastic and botanical forms, she considers land as a living archive of memory, identity and ecological knowledge.
Lucien Shapiro is an American multidisciplinary artist whose sculptures, masks, vessels, installations and performances transform found and discarded materials into ritual-like objects. His work explores protection, identity, compulsion, memory and personal transformation.
Morris Hork is an emerging Indonesian painter whose recent oil-on-canvas works have appeared in group presentations in Yogyakarta, including exhibitions connected with Ace House. His practice draws attention to intimate fragments and rhythms of contemporary experience.
Pecut Sumantri is an Indonesian painter born in Weleri, Kendal, in 1982. His paintings combine precisely rendered details with blurred figures and atmospheric passages, reflecting on perception, memory, identity and the desire to pause the passage of time.
Ricky Lee Gordon creates contemplative landscapes from natural pigments, dyes and raw textiles. Water, horizons and shifting light recur throughout his work as symbols of interdependence, impermanence and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Riko Shuri Monma is a New Zealand-born contemporary painter working between Japan and New Zealand. Drawing on her background in chemistry and chemical engineering, she connects scientific observation with medieval folklore, natural history and art-historical imagery.
Salvita De Corte is a Bali-born artist and actor of Indonesian, German and Indian heritage. Her paintings of bodies and portraits explore relationships, inherited memory and emotional states through layered colour, natural pigments and increasingly abstracted forms.
Satria Nugraha is an Indonesian multidisciplinary artist born in Tasikmalaya in 1986 and based in Bali. Working with printmaking, hand-stitching, charcoal, pigment, collage, video and installation, he draws inspiration from daily life and the search for harmony between people and nature.
Shayan Gunawan is a Bali-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice bridges sculpture, craft and design. Influenced by traditional techniques and wabi-sabi philosophy, she combines materials such as limestone and tropical hardwood in carefully balanced, graphic forms.
Sungai Design is the design-focused sister initiative of Sungai Watch. It transforms low-value plastic recovered from Indonesian rivers—particularly discarded plastic bags—into long-lasting furniture and art objects, helping create a circular source of support for cleanup work.
Yeon Kyung Park is a South Korean painter known for atmospheric still lifes. Through delicate brushwork, softened forms and restrained tone-on-tone colour, she explores memory, transience and the quiet beauty of overlooked everyday moments.
installation shots at SUN.CONTEMPORARY
A shared commitment to Bali’s rivers
Rivers in Ceremony brings many different practices, cultures and materials into a shared space. What connects them is a recognition that rivers are more than channels of water: they are living systems, carriers of memory and vital links between land, community and sea.
By visiting the exhibition, discovering the artists and supporting its fundraising purpose, audiences can help Sungai Watch continue the practical work of restoring Indonesia’s waterways.
View exhibition information, access the catalogue and RSVP through SUN.CONTEMPORARY.
