2025 recap + favorites
Dec. 24th, 2025 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
g3ryon(How much longer 'til I'm taller?)
(How much longer 'til it's midnight?)
(How much longer 'til the morning are my legs gonna last?)
Pool by Samia, which the above lyrics are from, is one of my favorite songs of all time. It is the opening song on her debut album The Baby – an album that I still play to no end since she released it in 2020. The first time I had listened to it, I immediately felt so awed and seen at how she managed to capture such a shared yet specific form of existential dread, grief, and longing that burns through early adulthood. She was 23 and I was 18 at that time, and the album evoked in me a sorrow so intense for a life that had been delayed, of imagining a version of myself where I wasn’t 18 or stuck in my bedroom or in this country anymore.
I am now 23 and am still confronting an evolved combination of dread, grief, and longing. I am writing this from my bedroom, in the country I was born in and to which I am obliged to retain some arbitrary sense of allegiance. My loved ones are scattered across the Earth. Their joys are my joys, their grief my grief. I’m so scared I’m not working hard enough. Sometimes I really wish I could relive the past five years but feel guilty about that afterwards, because I like to believe that everything happens for a reason and in its own time; then I realize that everyone else my age feels a similarly shaped regret (even those who don’t care to admit it) and that the cycle will turn. The only thing that has changed is that I have learned to welcome grief. Likewise, something that has remained true to me is my determination to move towards a point of emotional clarity and resolve, to find joy in and against forms of struggle – both personal and collective.
It is thus unsurprising that the three things I found myself reflecting on the most this year were work, home, and community. Viewed together, these notions are inextricably tethered to one another; any thought I would have about one would lead to a diverging yet related thought about the other(s). I could write extensively about each of them on any other occasion, but for the sake of this review format I will attempt to map their points of relation as concisely and coherently as possible.
Work
Postgrad anxiety is a fucking bitch, but postgrad anxiety as an international student felt like fighting a different beast entirely. I struggled immensely with believing whether the decisions I was making regarding my career were the best for me long-term, with feeling like the work I was doing was useless or directionless, and with feeling disillusioned with my entire field of study in general, all exacerbated by an ever-sharpening political consciousness and a ticking time bomb in the form of my work permit. Being in school, which had been a comfortable reality for the past 16 years of my life, became out of reach. I compared myself to my peers because I wasn’t working a conventional full time job (let alone my “dream” job/s) or pursuing graduate study or racking up art residency and fellowship opportunities. I know this experience is unfortunately common to the point where it is laughable, because this capitalistic hellscape we live in is operating exactly as designed: to drive people towards what feels like all-consuming isolation, bitterness, and envy.
In the gaps of these ugly feelings, I find myself examining the core of my creative practice. In February, I started a fellowship at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York, which was my first ever fellowship – one of my proudest achievements of this year! I experienced the most terrible impostor syndrome because all the other fellows were already mid-career or established artists. But as I continued to learn new techniques, the confusion and fear slowly dissipated, instead alchemizing into a devotion for creative routine. I realized that I could honestly just fuck around and learn whatever I wanted, as long as I was doing it. I remember feeling a smidge of pride when during our culminating fellowship presentation, another fellow expressed admiration at the amount of work I had produced. On the other hand, the post-fellowship period taught me a lot about rest and burnout; there remains the question of whether I am still an artist if I am not churning out work “consistently” (and if I still even want to be an artist, but that is a topic for another day). I am reminding myself practice moves differently for everyone, a realization that would have not materialized without the many conversations I have had with my artist friends about para-institutional modes of learning, the relationship between art and politics, and the importance of making work that is just fucking genuine.
Finally, I recently started working at a Singaporean art gallery. The work itself is fine (read: way above my pay grade) and very much related to my field of study and career goals, but I want so much more. But then the thing about wanting more is that I don’t want to romanticize a certain way of working or hyper-idealize a particular job in my mind, although there are some forms of work that I imagine to be more fulfilling than others. Of course, there are multiple factors that shape this notion of personal fulfillment, notably the need to be compensated fairly for my creative and intellectual labor, my desire to strengthen interpersonal relationships between communities, and my concern for devising the material and emotional infrastructure where these relationships can proliferate. There is so much that I’ve learned in the span of 1.5 months: that writing about art, which I love and always want to get better at doing, is so difficult now because my brain has become susceptible to the attention economy; that being neurodivergent in the workplace can really fuck with my psyche; and that somehow working a desk job is infinitely more tiring than having to supervise or teach kids for hours.
I think the key word at this point in my life is to learn, because as long as I am doing that, I am moving towards change. Working a desk job is a learning experience. Grinding and etching stone for a lithograph is a learning experience. Leaving the greatest city in the world is a learning experience. I accumulate this knowledge with the intention of its dispersal, to remind myself that I can always be wrong and try again, and that that is a gift.
Home
I moved back to Jakarta in September after living in New York for 4 years. If I didn’t have so many thoughts about the move, I would just type GAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! right now and be done with it. But I need to keep locating where it hurts the most to heal.
I sound as if I am exaggerating but leaving New York has been one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. Every day, I miss my friends, how I could get anywhere in the city on the train or bus, the lush parks, the art museums. The sheer range of good food: Trini rotis in Bedstuy, Palestinian mujadarra and mezze in Bay Ridge, Thai boat noodles in Astoria, 煎饼 in Flushing, Nepalese momos in Ridgewood. Visiting the Picture Collection and borrowing books from the New York Public Library. Running a bit (or very) late because I stopped to pet a bodega cat and buy cherry flavored seltzer. Riding Citibikes along the Brooklyn Bridge, as heavy as they were. How walkable the city was, solidified by multiple attempts to walk the island of Manhattan from tip to tip. I felt so at home there.
Being back in Jakarta has felt very strange and I keep trying to make room for the discomfort. I thought living alone abroad had made me somewhat more emotionally mature and immune to getting into screaming matches with my mom, but sometimes I feel like I’m regressing just by being here. There is only so much that nostalgia can cover up. The discomfort manifests physiologically as well; my eczema keeps flaring up especially during the current rainy season, the dust and pollution worsens my allergies, and I feel nonstop masuk angin – a bloated kind of nausea – from transitioning between rooms of blasting AC to sticky, windy humidity. The only thing I am slightly proud of has been my efforts to reconsider navigation around the city. I take the MRT and KRL to work and while Stasiun Sudirman is a rush hour nightmare, it feels so good to just be on my feet. Although my preferences for accessible walking areas currently limits my hangout places to Blok M, I am determined to keep expanding my options. One of my goals for the near future is to familiarize myself with intercity KRL lines, such as to Tangerang or Bogor.
Every time I talk to other Indonesians about the move, I brace myself for the question of why. Why would you leave and give it all up? Why didn’t you try harder to stay? I say this was a decision that I made willingly, that I didn’t want to feel limited by time or border policy or rush my plans for the sake of chasing an inherited yet unresolved American dream. I recognize that it has been a big privilege for me to be able to make that decision. Still, I hate feeling like I’m being pitied or scrutinized but I know that that also stems from a place of insecurity within me.
It has taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I don’t feel very Indonesian despite having been born and raised here – even now, I still slightly cringe at the diaspora/third culture kid label. Previously, I was more resistant to not being perceived as “Indonesian enough” but my definition of “being Indonesian” has also changed so much over the years. Something I kept thinking about this year is that I don’t think I will ever feel “at home” in one country or another as long as empire and capitalism persists. What does it mean to “be Indonesian” in the face of censorship, militarized and carceral state violence, government greed and impunity, environmental exploitation, and the rewriting of national history to obscure genocide and human rights abuses? These might sound like predictable questions from a diasporic standpoint. I can only offer equally predictable answers: that I still don’t know, and that I want to get better at speaking and writing in Indonesian so that my horizon of sociopolitical awareness can get wider. The ones we love are the enemies of the state. I want to be engaged in mutual aid on a more consistent level, and to tend to historical memory as an efficacious means for individual and collective liberation. And I want to find people that have these same desires.
Community
In the process of moving back to Jakarta, I was anticipating finding community/ies that I could be a part of based on my interests. Unlike notions of work or home, which can be a bit more insular and thus easier to adapt to/view as a distraction/predict its outcomes, finding community has felt slower for me.
What I like about the communities that I found in New York was that they were often specific yet intersectional, so I ended up reflecting about time spent with one community even when I was surrounded by another. I really appreciated that Nongki is a space for Indonesians who are queer, have artistic or creative practices, and are engaged in a deeper revolutionary politics that surpasses superficial discussions of Indonesian culture/experience (sorry not sorry!!). Going to events hosted by Lez Night Out, a Covid-conscious lesbian collective, affirmed my desire for lesbian spaces that prioritize community care and gave me ideas for how I might want to organize lesbian centered events of my own in the future. Both communities are examples of how I want to build spaces of care, joy, and inclusivity. Beyond larger events, I’m so grateful for the circle of friends who have been there for me at different points of my life in the city; whether we met at school or through a mutual friend or at an organizing meeting, I sometimes cannot believe how simultaneously curated and expansive community can be. #hosting themed dinner parties will truly save your life.
In turn, maybe the “hyperspecificity” of such communities that I have encountered has given me certain expectations of how I want to find and build community here. I do think that finding the right community/ies is largely a matter of time – that was exactly what it was like for me in New York; and I think the desire to have community feels more urgent at this point in my life because the physical and emotional transition of moving is so stark. I think moving back here has also heightened my self-consciousness of not having been around to witness the transformation and growth of queer, creative, and political communities here, and the contexts from which such communities grew; to this end, I am wary of speaking from a perspective where I am too critical or misinformed of such growth.
It’s funny that I struggle with feeling Indonesian but feel most excited about being Indonesian when I meet other Indonesian lesbians and queer women. Like, it’s actually so fucking awesome that there are so, so many of us. I found myself reflecting a lot on the intersection of those two identities within myself this year, and how feelings of isolation and desire mirror each other. A dream project of mine is to make an oral history and or zine series documenting historical and contemporary lesbian life in Jakarta, or even across Indonesia. It’ll be a while until I get to even developing an ongoing series that can be widely distributed and where people can contribute, since censorship and surveillance are unfortunately very real, but I want to start at a smaller scale and then hopefully expand it over time. I also miss being more actively involved in political/revolutionary organizing, and the necessary friction of meeting other people who share or contradict my perspective. Something I really want to achieve this coming year, beyond an expansion of political awareness, is some level of direct involvement through either volunteering or being part of a community that facilitates horizontal political education.
The word that I chose to define 2025 at the start of the year was trust. Trust that moving back here would be good, that I’ll find the right people, and it’s already happening. There have been many days where the loneliness is unbearable and I feel as though I am losing grip on that sense of trust, but during moments where I find myself retreating into the comfort of despair, I return to the words of Qiu Miaojin:
I take complete responsibility for my life. Compared to the beautiful shimmer of the glittering life that I want to bring to completion, the suffering of the body means nothing. I can endure, and I will keep smiling.
Favorites of 2025
Here is a non-exhaustive list of media and other things I enjoyed this year. Items in blue were especially memorable ^^
Books
A Sturdy Yes of a People, Joan Nestle (2022)
Art in the After Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy, Ben Davis (2022)
Look, Solmaz Sharif (2016)
Last Words From Montmartre, Qiu Miaojin (2014)
Kill the Radio, Dorothea Rosa Herliany (2007)
Out of Place, Edward Said (1999)
Music
Bloodless, Samia (2025)
Fancy That, PinkPantheress (2025)
In The Blue Light, Kelela (2025)
EUSEXUA + EUSEXUA Afterglow, FKA Twigs (2025)
Bleeds, Wednesday (2025)
The Passionate Ones, Nourished By Time (2025)
Essex Honey, Blood Orange (2025)
Virgin, Lorde (2025)
Getting Killed, Geese (2025)
Heavy Metal, Cameron Winter (2024) (thank you Siobhan)
Lianne La Havas, Lianne La Havas (2020)
Live music
FKA Twigs @ Ladyland
Jockstrap @ Knockdown Center
L’Rain @ 99 Scott
Ichiko Aoba @ Kings Theater
Themilo @ Krapela
Films
The Wedding Banquet, dir. Andrew Ahn (2025)
Frankenstein, dir. Guillermo del Toro (2025)
The Aggressives, dir. Daniel Peddle (2005)
Monsoon Wedding, dir. Mira Nair (2001)
India Cabaret, dir. Mira Nair (1985)
Art exhibitions
Jack Whitten: The Messenger @ MoMA
Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP @ MoMA
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved @ Dia Beacon
Raven Chacon: Aviary @ Academy of Arts and Letters
Elle Pérez: The World Is Always Again Beginning @ Academy of Arts and Letters
Edges of Ailey @ The Whitney Museum
Talks, classes, workshops
Stone Lithography with Devraj Dakoji, at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
Speculative Diagramming Workshop with Kameelah Janan Rasheed, at Swiss Institute
A Common Wind with Ryan C. Clarke and Ashley Teamer, Triple Canopy
The Aggressives (2005) screening + talk, Lesbian Herstory Archives
Miscellaneous
Jukut goreng, specifically from Lima Suap and Nasi Bejeg Wijaya
Solo travelling
S*ngapore’s MRT system (WHAT THE FUCK MAN. NOT FAIR)
Running
My Harley Davidson boots
Lesbian Library Day @ NYPL
catfishing.net, subwaydle.com, worldle.teuteuf.fr, whentaken.com/game
(How much longer 'til it's midnight?)
(How much longer 'til the morning are my legs gonna last?)
Pool by Samia, which the above lyrics are from, is one of my favorite songs of all time. It is the opening song on her debut album The Baby – an album that I still play to no end since she released it in 2020. The first time I had listened to it, I immediately felt so awed and seen at how she managed to capture such a shared yet specific form of existential dread, grief, and longing that burns through early adulthood. She was 23 and I was 18 at that time, and the album evoked in me a sorrow so intense for a life that had been delayed, of imagining a version of myself where I wasn’t 18 or stuck in my bedroom or in this country anymore.
I am now 23 and am still confronting an evolved combination of dread, grief, and longing. I am writing this from my bedroom, in the country I was born in and to which I am obliged to retain some arbitrary sense of allegiance. My loved ones are scattered across the Earth. Their joys are my joys, their grief my grief. I’m so scared I’m not working hard enough. Sometimes I really wish I could relive the past five years but feel guilty about that afterwards, because I like to believe that everything happens for a reason and in its own time; then I realize that everyone else my age feels a similarly shaped regret (even those who don’t care to admit it) and that the cycle will turn. The only thing that has changed is that I have learned to welcome grief. Likewise, something that has remained true to me is my determination to move towards a point of emotional clarity and resolve, to find joy in and against forms of struggle – both personal and collective.
It is thus unsurprising that the three things I found myself reflecting on the most this year were work, home, and community. Viewed together, these notions are inextricably tethered to one another; any thought I would have about one would lead to a diverging yet related thought about the other(s). I could write extensively about each of them on any other occasion, but for the sake of this review format I will attempt to map their points of relation as concisely and coherently as possible.
Work
Postgrad anxiety is a fucking bitch, but postgrad anxiety as an international student felt like fighting a different beast entirely. I struggled immensely with believing whether the decisions I was making regarding my career were the best for me long-term, with feeling like the work I was doing was useless or directionless, and with feeling disillusioned with my entire field of study in general, all exacerbated by an ever-sharpening political consciousness and a ticking time bomb in the form of my work permit. Being in school, which had been a comfortable reality for the past 16 years of my life, became out of reach. I compared myself to my peers because I wasn’t working a conventional full time job (let alone my “dream” job/s) or pursuing graduate study or racking up art residency and fellowship opportunities. I know this experience is unfortunately common to the point where it is laughable, because this capitalistic hellscape we live in is operating exactly as designed: to drive people towards what feels like all-consuming isolation, bitterness, and envy.
In the gaps of these ugly feelings, I find myself examining the core of my creative practice. In February, I started a fellowship at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York, which was my first ever fellowship – one of my proudest achievements of this year! I experienced the most terrible impostor syndrome because all the other fellows were already mid-career or established artists. But as I continued to learn new techniques, the confusion and fear slowly dissipated, instead alchemizing into a devotion for creative routine. I realized that I could honestly just fuck around and learn whatever I wanted, as long as I was doing it. I remember feeling a smidge of pride when during our culminating fellowship presentation, another fellow expressed admiration at the amount of work I had produced. On the other hand, the post-fellowship period taught me a lot about rest and burnout; there remains the question of whether I am still an artist if I am not churning out work “consistently” (and if I still even want to be an artist, but that is a topic for another day). I am reminding myself practice moves differently for everyone, a realization that would have not materialized without the many conversations I have had with my artist friends about para-institutional modes of learning, the relationship between art and politics, and the importance of making work that is just fucking genuine.
Finally, I recently started working at a Singaporean art gallery. The work itself is fine (read: way above my pay grade) and very much related to my field of study and career goals, but I want so much more. But then the thing about wanting more is that I don’t want to romanticize a certain way of working or hyper-idealize a particular job in my mind, although there are some forms of work that I imagine to be more fulfilling than others. Of course, there are multiple factors that shape this notion of personal fulfillment, notably the need to be compensated fairly for my creative and intellectual labor, my desire to strengthen interpersonal relationships between communities, and my concern for devising the material and emotional infrastructure where these relationships can proliferate. There is so much that I’ve learned in the span of 1.5 months: that writing about art, which I love and always want to get better at doing, is so difficult now because my brain has become susceptible to the attention economy; that being neurodivergent in the workplace can really fuck with my psyche; and that somehow working a desk job is infinitely more tiring than having to supervise or teach kids for hours.
I think the key word at this point in my life is to learn, because as long as I am doing that, I am moving towards change. Working a desk job is a learning experience. Grinding and etching stone for a lithograph is a learning experience. Leaving the greatest city in the world is a learning experience. I accumulate this knowledge with the intention of its dispersal, to remind myself that I can always be wrong and try again, and that that is a gift.
Home
I moved back to Jakarta in September after living in New York for 4 years. If I didn’t have so many thoughts about the move, I would just type GAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! right now and be done with it. But I need to keep locating where it hurts the most to heal.
I sound as if I am exaggerating but leaving New York has been one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. Every day, I miss my friends, how I could get anywhere in the city on the train or bus, the lush parks, the art museums. The sheer range of good food: Trini rotis in Bedstuy, Palestinian mujadarra and mezze in Bay Ridge, Thai boat noodles in Astoria, 煎饼 in Flushing, Nepalese momos in Ridgewood. Visiting the Picture Collection and borrowing books from the New York Public Library. Running a bit (or very) late because I stopped to pet a bodega cat and buy cherry flavored seltzer. Riding Citibikes along the Brooklyn Bridge, as heavy as they were. How walkable the city was, solidified by multiple attempts to walk the island of Manhattan from tip to tip. I felt so at home there.
Being back in Jakarta has felt very strange and I keep trying to make room for the discomfort. I thought living alone abroad had made me somewhat more emotionally mature and immune to getting into screaming matches with my mom, but sometimes I feel like I’m regressing just by being here. There is only so much that nostalgia can cover up. The discomfort manifests physiologically as well; my eczema keeps flaring up especially during the current rainy season, the dust and pollution worsens my allergies, and I feel nonstop masuk angin – a bloated kind of nausea – from transitioning between rooms of blasting AC to sticky, windy humidity. The only thing I am slightly proud of has been my efforts to reconsider navigation around the city. I take the MRT and KRL to work and while Stasiun Sudirman is a rush hour nightmare, it feels so good to just be on my feet. Although my preferences for accessible walking areas currently limits my hangout places to Blok M, I am determined to keep expanding my options. One of my goals for the near future is to familiarize myself with intercity KRL lines, such as to Tangerang or Bogor.
Every time I talk to other Indonesians about the move, I brace myself for the question of why. Why would you leave and give it all up? Why didn’t you try harder to stay? I say this was a decision that I made willingly, that I didn’t want to feel limited by time or border policy or rush my plans for the sake of chasing an inherited yet unresolved American dream. I recognize that it has been a big privilege for me to be able to make that decision. Still, I hate feeling like I’m being pitied or scrutinized but I know that that also stems from a place of insecurity within me.
It has taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I don’t feel very Indonesian despite having been born and raised here – even now, I still slightly cringe at the diaspora/third culture kid label. Previously, I was more resistant to not being perceived as “Indonesian enough” but my definition of “being Indonesian” has also changed so much over the years. Something I kept thinking about this year is that I don’t think I will ever feel “at home” in one country or another as long as empire and capitalism persists. What does it mean to “be Indonesian” in the face of censorship, militarized and carceral state violence, government greed and impunity, environmental exploitation, and the rewriting of national history to obscure genocide and human rights abuses? These might sound like predictable questions from a diasporic standpoint. I can only offer equally predictable answers: that I still don’t know, and that I want to get better at speaking and writing in Indonesian so that my horizon of sociopolitical awareness can get wider. The ones we love are the enemies of the state. I want to be engaged in mutual aid on a more consistent level, and to tend to historical memory as an efficacious means for individual and collective liberation. And I want to find people that have these same desires.
Community
In the process of moving back to Jakarta, I was anticipating finding community/ies that I could be a part of based on my interests. Unlike notions of work or home, which can be a bit more insular and thus easier to adapt to/view as a distraction/predict its outcomes, finding community has felt slower for me.
What I like about the communities that I found in New York was that they were often specific yet intersectional, so I ended up reflecting about time spent with one community even when I was surrounded by another. I really appreciated that Nongki is a space for Indonesians who are queer, have artistic or creative practices, and are engaged in a deeper revolutionary politics that surpasses superficial discussions of Indonesian culture/experience (sorry not sorry!!). Going to events hosted by Lez Night Out, a Covid-conscious lesbian collective, affirmed my desire for lesbian spaces that prioritize community care and gave me ideas for how I might want to organize lesbian centered events of my own in the future. Both communities are examples of how I want to build spaces of care, joy, and inclusivity. Beyond larger events, I’m so grateful for the circle of friends who have been there for me at different points of my life in the city; whether we met at school or through a mutual friend or at an organizing meeting, I sometimes cannot believe how simultaneously curated and expansive community can be. #hosting themed dinner parties will truly save your life.
In turn, maybe the “hyperspecificity” of such communities that I have encountered has given me certain expectations of how I want to find and build community here. I do think that finding the right community/ies is largely a matter of time – that was exactly what it was like for me in New York; and I think the desire to have community feels more urgent at this point in my life because the physical and emotional transition of moving is so stark. I think moving back here has also heightened my self-consciousness of not having been around to witness the transformation and growth of queer, creative, and political communities here, and the contexts from which such communities grew; to this end, I am wary of speaking from a perspective where I am too critical or misinformed of such growth.
It’s funny that I struggle with feeling Indonesian but feel most excited about being Indonesian when I meet other Indonesian lesbians and queer women. Like, it’s actually so fucking awesome that there are so, so many of us. I found myself reflecting a lot on the intersection of those two identities within myself this year, and how feelings of isolation and desire mirror each other. A dream project of mine is to make an oral history and or zine series documenting historical and contemporary lesbian life in Jakarta, or even across Indonesia. It’ll be a while until I get to even developing an ongoing series that can be widely distributed and where people can contribute, since censorship and surveillance are unfortunately very real, but I want to start at a smaller scale and then hopefully expand it over time. I also miss being more actively involved in political/revolutionary organizing, and the necessary friction of meeting other people who share or contradict my perspective. Something I really want to achieve this coming year, beyond an expansion of political awareness, is some level of direct involvement through either volunteering or being part of a community that facilitates horizontal political education.
The word that I chose to define 2025 at the start of the year was trust. Trust that moving back here would be good, that I’ll find the right people, and it’s already happening. There have been many days where the loneliness is unbearable and I feel as though I am losing grip on that sense of trust, but during moments where I find myself retreating into the comfort of despair, I return to the words of Qiu Miaojin:
I take complete responsibility for my life. Compared to the beautiful shimmer of the glittering life that I want to bring to completion, the suffering of the body means nothing. I can endure, and I will keep smiling.
Favorites of 2025
Here is a non-exhaustive list of media and other things I enjoyed this year. Items in blue were especially memorable ^^
Books
A Sturdy Yes of a People, Joan Nestle (2022)
Art in the After Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy, Ben Davis (2022)
Look, Solmaz Sharif (2016)
Last Words From Montmartre, Qiu Miaojin (2014)
Kill the Radio, Dorothea Rosa Herliany (2007)
Out of Place, Edward Said (1999)
Music
Bloodless, Samia (2025)
Fancy That, PinkPantheress (2025)
In The Blue Light, Kelela (2025)
EUSEXUA + EUSEXUA Afterglow, FKA Twigs (2025)
Bleeds, Wednesday (2025)
The Passionate Ones, Nourished By Time (2025)
Essex Honey, Blood Orange (2025)
Virgin, Lorde (2025)
Getting Killed, Geese (2025)
Heavy Metal, Cameron Winter (2024) (thank you Siobhan)
Lianne La Havas, Lianne La Havas (2020)
Live music
FKA Twigs @ Ladyland
Jockstrap @ Knockdown Center
L’Rain @ 99 Scott
Ichiko Aoba @ Kings Theater
Themilo @ Krapela
Films
The Wedding Banquet, dir. Andrew Ahn (2025)
Frankenstein, dir. Guillermo del Toro (2025)
The Aggressives, dir. Daniel Peddle (2005)
Monsoon Wedding, dir. Mira Nair (2001)
India Cabaret, dir. Mira Nair (1985)
Art exhibitions
Jack Whitten: The Messenger @ MoMA
Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP @ MoMA
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved @ Dia Beacon
Raven Chacon: Aviary @ Academy of Arts and Letters
Elle Pérez: The World Is Always Again Beginning @ Academy of Arts and Letters
Edges of Ailey @ The Whitney Museum
Talks, classes, workshops
Stone Lithography with Devraj Dakoji, at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
Speculative Diagramming Workshop with Kameelah Janan Rasheed, at Swiss Institute
A Common Wind with Ryan C. Clarke and Ashley Teamer, Triple Canopy
The Aggressives (2005) screening + talk, Lesbian Herstory Archives
Miscellaneous
Jukut goreng, specifically from Lima Suap and Nasi Bejeg Wijaya
Solo travelling
S*ngapore’s MRT system (WHAT THE FUCK MAN. NOT FAIR)
Running
My Harley Davidson boots
Lesbian Library Day @ NYPL
catfishing.net, subwaydle.com, worldle.teuteuf.fr, whentaken.com/game
