EXHIBITIONS /

menggodam

17 August – 2 November 2025 (Level 3)

We are delighted to announce our latest exhibition on level 3. Curated by Roopesh Sitharan and Gunalan Nadarajan, menggodam is an exhibition presenting cultural ingenuity in engaging and reimagining the technological through the work of 9 artists from Southeast Asia.

The Malay word menggodam is multivalent with a rich range of uses including hacking, disruption, untoward (ab)use, creative remaking and even piracy. In this exhibition, we present menggodam as the cultural ingenuity of reprogramming to execute one’s own programme. Such cultural strategies for engaging and appropriating technologies are also found in different guises in Asia — the cultures of creative hacking and copying reflected in shanzai and the pragmatic compromises of chabuduo in China, the exuberant hyperfunctionality of Japanese devices called chindogu, the makeshift contraptions of jugaat in India, the resourceful and frugal solutions of diskarte in the Philippines and the cunning and subversive techniques of akalakalaan in Indonesia.

In each of these contexts, creative reconfiguring and vernacular appropriation not only point to culturally located ways of making but in fact, posit strategies for short-circuiting the closures and exclusionary logic of hardware, systems, and infrastructures, especially those inherited from outside these cultures. The cultural inventiveness of such practices have developed in relation to a wider contestation over making in the last half century — who makes and how one makes and how that which is made is valued — evident in the intersecting histories of open source and maker movements, and hacker and DIY cultures.

The exhibition locates itself in this milieu of making, bringing together artists from the region to speculate on the radical potential of cultural practices like menggodam to unsettle and point to alternative ways of imagining our relationship to the ‘technological’. 

Featuring the work of Corinne de San Jose, Fendi Mazalan, Giang Nguyen Hoang, Haris Abadi, Hoo Fan Chon, Mira Rizki Kurnia, Tisya Wong, Witaya Junma, and Yang Jie.

Supported by The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) and Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan.

Sunday, 17 August 2025

11:30am – Curatorial Walkthrough

2:30pm – Panel discussion with all participating artists and curators