One of Leyla Stevens’s favourite strategies is the long shot. Her moving image works unfold very slowly and it is part of why her works are so easy to sink into. She gives her subjects room to breathe, and her audiences, too. But her lingering gaze does more than capture a moment, it also turns attention to what is not seen.

In the acclaimed Kidung (2019), the Balinese-Australian artist responded to the mass murder of communists in Bali in the 1960s. The three-channel video work centres the late poet Cok Sawitri as she performs a lament, and frames her with footage of a banyan tree growing by an unmarked gravesite. As the emotion in Sawitri’s voice travels up and out, the tree begins to feel like a sentinel or witness, both a home for spirits and a spirit itself.

The major new work PAHIT-MANIS, Night Forest (2024), co-curated by Artspace and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, focuses on a collection of ink paintings made by artists from the village of Batuan in Bali, Indonesia in the 1930s, which were commissioned by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. There was a core group of around 22 artists, including the master painter Ida Bagus Madé Togog, but they have become something of an academic footnote, overshadowed by the prominent Western researchers, while their paintings are now spread across several public and private collections in the United States and Australia.

Many of the Batuan paintings blend physical and immaterial worlds, with Bhuta-Kala daemons and witches represented alongside more familiar animals and plants. In PAHIT-MANIS, Night Forest, Stevens brings them to life, turning the paintings into an animation—a first for the artist. She then layers this animation with audio recordings from threatened forests on the island today. The nuanced work draws out various kinds of environmental precarity. Like Kidung, it lingers on questions of what is seen and not seen, and what is valued and what is not.

They are critical questions. Though Stevens works with very specific research points and histories, her broader project is about bringing things to light. How it can be done. How we can hold knowledge that does not easily fit object-based archives or memorial practices. The difficult subjects. The political silences. The immaterial.

These interests place Stevens in a wide field of artists engaging with counter-archives, which she’s written about in her doctoral thesis. For the moment, the success of prize-winning works like Kidung has concentrated Australian attention on how Stevens works with the traces of history in the landscape—an exploration of real resonance here. This commentary will likely continue with the exhibition of PAHIT-MANIS, Night Forest in November. At the same time, other lines of inquiry have also been taking powerful shape in her work.

Alongside the animation, PAHIT-MANIS, Night Forest includes a contemporary reworking of Indonesia’s Tantri stories. These stories are considered fables for children and contain moral lessons about how to live in harmony with other people and the environment. Stevens worked with young dalang shadow puppet master Ida Ayu Sri Widnyani to script what a new Tantri for Bali might sound like now. What can or should be passed on? What are the contemporary stories of resilience or instruction? It is also fascinating because, in the oral storytelling tradition, the figure of Tantri is like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights. She’s a woman spinning tales to try to keep her life, and so the end of each story is the beginning of a new one. A linked chain.

Again and again, Stevens returns to questions of lineage and transference. In works like Patiwangi, the death of fragrance (2021) and GROH GOH (Rehearsal for Rangda) (2023), Stevens employs dance and ritualised movements to call up creative lineages and histories. In a sense, the body is its own archive.

In GROH GOH (Rehearsal for Rangda), Stevens explores the matriarchal archetype of the powerful witch Rangda. Traditionally, she’s performed by men, but in this work the role is given to women. The work follows the group of women as they learn the visceral and menacing choreography, and discuss how they see and understand the figure of Rangda. In a final sequence, the lead performer, the metal singer Karina Utomo, performs the animalistic grunts and vocalisations that give the work its name. At its heart, GROH GOH (Rehearsal for Rangda) is a work about practising, enacting and adapting power and knowledge.

Stevens might seem like an impartial observer. Her clear research topics and long, uninterrupted shots can suggest her role is observational or documentary. That is not the case, of course. She is much more involved than that. And as a Balinese-Australian artist whose work is regularly shown in major institutions, she is firmly part of the diaspora and the cultural transformations that GROH GOH (Rehearsal for Rangda) is moving around. That comes through in her collaborative approach, too. Her research-led practice often involves extensive community consultation, especially to obtain cultural permissions. For PAHIT-MANIS, Night Forest, that included wide-ranging conversations with the descendants of the Batuan artists, including some who had never seen the original paintings. Then, of course, there are the collaborations that happen on-screen with performers like Utomo, Widnyani, and Sawitri. Her practice speaks back to dominant narratives that pitch Bali as an exotic island paradise, and also insists on the fluidity of living culture.

A strong undercurrent to Stevens’s recent work is the movement and flow of ideas and bodies. In the poignant Labours for Colour (2021), recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, she responds to Dr John Yu’s collection of South-East Asian textiles and artefacts, interlacing footage of the collector in his home with the work of dyeing, spinning and weaving cepuk cloth on the island of Nusa Penida. The work raises many concrete questions about markets and collection practices, but the labour-intensive process of making the cloth also starts to feel like another kind of choreography. Attention lingers on the artisans’ hands. What unfolds is a sense of habituated practice—the knowledge that is worn into and held deep within the body. Perhaps it is the simple, unchangeable fact that bodies never last that gives this work its power. Perhaps it is part of why Stevens is so drawn to forms of ritualised movement, too. There is history here, and time.

Leyla Stevens: PAHIT-MANIS, Night Forest 
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
2 November 2024 – 16 February 2025