Yutaka ‘Isa’ Asmara

 Yutaka “Isa” Asmara is an Indonesian artist, writer, and youth activist based in Moh’kinstsis. Involved in their communities at home and at school, they were the two-year delegate for the Chief Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council and were nominated for the Premier’s Citizenship Award for community service. Their fine arts work explores themes of cultural hybridity, intimacy, and visuality, having exhibited in the Northeast Mini Galleries and the Little Gallery at UofC. Yutaka seeks to reveal and redefine the great political and social forces affecting the communities they belong to as inherently intimate, observing and compelling moments where that intimacy can affect the world.

Rearrange my insides, 2024

Rearrange my insides came from a greater series contending directly with shame and desire as a queer Muslim, at the intersection of visuality and intimacy. The place where the subject is wounded deeply is the same point which bears fruit—which also obscures the wound itself. Above it, a tasbih similar to a pearl necklace falls and curves similar to the subject's intestines. The piece's title comes from how online we might adoringly refer to sex, though it notes particular the aggression of the language we use in doing so, the piece explicating the body horror to which we think of the erotic as a whole."