Nessa Theo is a visual artist and researcher based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Noticing how academia, with its theories and arguments often articulated textually, is extremely exclusive, she explores different approaches and articulations through art. Her works processes and transforms theoretical jargons into the realms of feelings.
She also includes community-based projects in her practice to create spaces of exchange on memory and identity that aim for collective liberation. As a whole, her body of work challenges stereotypes, and therefore shows the cracks and inconsistencies of racial constructions either done to and done by the Chinese-Indonesians. In her practice, artworks and artistic research are positioned as tools of enquiry, dissemination, and pedagogy, which aims for transformations.
