Primeval Playground (maquette of recent work), 2024–2025

Mixed media
Dimensions variable

PRIMEVAL PLAYGROUND is a portal—into memory, imagination, and the “other.” Natasha Lubis draws on childhood stories, folklore, and colonial-era photographs of Indonesian women, reflecting on her ancestral heritage and reimagining these images to reclaim their agency and challenge fixed narratives. She seeks to disrupt the one-way gaze of archival images. By reassembling these figures through play, Lubis allows them to look back at the audience as active subjects, opening layered perceptions of femininity and history. Her work moves fluidly between personal memory and collective archetypes, exploring femininity, desire, and power, guided by a whimsical, playful visual language that embraces the uncanny.