Anonymous, by Oktianita Kusmugiarti.

Amid the hustle and bustle of large events and breakthroughs in the art world, smaller shows tend to be forgotten.

Yet there are little stars waiting for their moment of truth.

In the newly opened cute gallery called Inkubator, founded by Telly Gontha and Rifky Effendy last January, the exhibition of two emerging female artists shows works that may appear childlike at first, but in fact explore in a fresh way visual idioms revealing thoughts and reflecting on memories.

As Rifky, a curator who is always seeking new young talent, says, the gallery seeks to show recent developments in Indonesian contemporary practice.

It is not that the two artists in this exhibition — who know each other from students days at the Art School of Bandung Institute of Technology — have never participated in a show, but it is as if this new space gives special luster to the details that matters most in their works, something that might have remained hidden in other, joint shows.

Indeed, the combination of embroidery and silkscreen in the works of Leyla Aprilla (born in 1987) comes as a conspicuous highlight on the white wall of the gallery. Leyla Aprilla or Ella for short, says her technique was inspired by her mother’s habit of making crochet. To create her image, she outlines her face with colored wool stitches achieving a surprisingly realistic image.

Leyla’s figures are mostly taken from her mother’s family album, although her interest in history has also led her to visualize Indonesia’s first national leaders with her woollen stitches.

Interestingly, she will always have a background historically fitting to the time in which the image was made.

For her great grandfather’s face, a Dutchmen who came to the Indies in the 1920s, she used the iconic Dutch ship from the time of the VOC in the background, while her father’s image is set against the building where the groundbreaking Asia Africa Conference was held in Bandung in 1954.

While the faces are shaped with stitches in vibrant colored wool thread, the backgrounds are made of silkscreen.

Like Leyla, Oktanita Kasmugiarti or Tia for short, was born in 1987. Her images however, flow not from albums, but from her memory of childhood toys, of good friends who enhanced her energy levels, or of people who attracted her attention and whose picture she took without them knowing.

She likes to observe people while sitting in a café, on a bus or in crowded places where taking photos is less obvious. She also likes to surf the internet for pictures of great men and women she admires, such as Einstein. Tia’s cartoonlike images are made in watercolor or pen and pencil on paper. The work titled Me in Them features realistic faces of her friends, eternalizing the ones she made on her path to adulthood. Unlike the images she made with a pen, pencil or water color, the images in Anonymous are black, for which she used black ink.

Curator Rifky Effendy likes to “hunt” for emerging talents, to guide and promote them with care until they blossom. The gallery named Inkubtor is likened to an intensive care unit for unusually small or premature babies.

“It is a space dedicated to emerging artists so they can exhibit and promote their works,” he says. Physically, the space does have the shape of an incubator. Nestled on the basement of forme building, it is small, minimalist and very clean.

Friends & Co.

A joint exhibition
by Leyla Aprilia and Oktianita Kusmugiarto
at Inkubator Gallery
forme Building
Jl. Wijaya I/39, Jakarta 12170
Phone +62 21 72788242
until Feb. 17, 2011.

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