Maharani Mancanagara

Maharani Mancanagara is an Indonesian artist who lives and works in Bandung, Indonesia. Graduated from Institut Teknologi Bandung, Faculty of Art and Design, majoring in the printmaking studio, she primarily working in the mediums of drawing, mixed media, and installation. Her works explore Indonesia's history, ancient times to present, based on her personal and family experiences.

Ideas occur within our natural consciousness on present happenings, while history is then derived as a media, connecting different times through historiography of past occurrences. Aided by a mandatory causal relationship, history is coherently based solely on the writer of the record. This subject is the drive for Maharani to enunciate stories from the outer realm of popular documented history, transforming those to reconstructed monuments. In the last five years, Maharani honed this tendency of devising interruptions as a fragment outside of history's known continuity that affects incidents in the past.

Taking her personal background, Maharani grew her interest upon visualizing the long history of education in Indonesia and, for the past two years, continued to the topic about the exile of political prisoners in Indonesia--a part of history left on artifacts from her late grandfather's possessions. Based on the aforementioned perspective, Maharani then aimed to express these belongings to a work of art, a path she took to identify herself, which she hopes could provide recognition for a larger sphere of people with a similar background.