Zico Albaiquni: To all the steps that shake the land’s memory

Next date: Saturday, 27 June 2026 | 10:00 AM to Sunday, 13 September 2026 | 04:00 PM

Zico Albaiquni, ‘Bingbrung Ledeng’ (work in progress), 2025–26. Image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Daffa Ananta Sanjaya

Zico Albaiquni approaches painting as a layered, relational act rather than as the creation of a finished image. His work is grounded in the Indonesian concept of ‘lukis’ – a method of making that is intertwined with ritual, labour, spirituality and everyday life. He works with existing images that hold personal, cultural and colonial histories, overlaying and obscuring these images to allow contradictions to remain visible.  

'To all the steps that shake the land’s memory’ presents two new monumental paintings which explore how memory is carried through bodies, gestures and communal practices, and how land, water and people are continuously shaping each other. The works invite viewers to slow down and look carefully, staying with complexity and unresolved histories rather than neat or beautiful conclusions.  

These new works have been shaped by Albaiquni’s journeys between his current home of Melbourne, his family home in Bandung and Ciamis, Indonesia, as well as through creative residencies at Campbelltown Arts Centre.  

Zico Albaiquni was born in Indonesia and currently lives in Melbourne. He creates vibrant, complex works that interrogate representations of Indonesia, its colonial past, the Eurocentrism of the art history canon, and his own commodified role as a painter. His work often references the legacy of colonial painting in Indonesia, including ‘Mooi Indie’ (beautiful Indies) painting, which romanticised the landscape and its people under Dutch rule while erasing their struggles. Zico’s saturated colour palette, often dismissed as ‘kampungan’ (vulgar), is a deliberate reclamation of local aesthetics.  

Albaiquni is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from the Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia. He has exhibited extensively in Indonesia and internationally, notable exhibitions include ‘A Tear in the Fabric’, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 2025; ‘Our Colonial Heritage’, Tropenmuseum, Netherlands, 2022; ‘Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2019; and the ‘9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2018-19.

When

Location

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 1 Art Gallery Road, 2560, View Map