BASEL.- With Sumber Alam, Kunsthalle Basel presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Europe by Bagus Pandega (b. 1985). Spanning several rooms, the exhibition unfolds as a choreographed sequence of works that speak to each other, fusing poetic sensibility with a deep engagement with technological processes tracing shifting entanglements between machines, signals, and living matter.

Rooted in field research, the exhibition responds to environmental upheavals in Indonesia, where the expansion of palm oil plantations and nickel extraction are transforming landscapes and livelihoods. Pandega translates these dynamics into an ecosystem of interacting machines and signals: a plant-controlled erasing machine, a sound installation carved from wood obtained through deforestation, and a video game-like excavation simulator exploring how extractive, resource-driven growth reverberates through ecology and everyday life.

The title Sumber Alam, or “source of nature,” points to both the material resources and symbolic forces at play in the exhibition. Pandega treats objects not as static elements but as active agents, recording, resonating with, and reconfiguring the world around them. Materials, such as nickel, wood, and biofeedback signals, become part of a fragile yet intricate circuit, where plants prompt motion and machines echo natural rhythms.

By reconfiguring industrial materials and mechanical processes, Pandega opens up a space where nature speaks back. When wood hums, nickel pulses and sends out signals, and plants control machines, the presence and influence of nonhuman life becomes unmistakably animate within human systems.

Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the exhibition invites visitors to navigate a loop of energies between growth and erosion and memory and erasure, questioning the cost of so-called sustainable progress and imagining a future led not by extraction, but by nature itself.

Mechanical systems, living organisms, and human histories are bound into a shared circuitry where plants fuel machines, natural materials become carriers of sound, and handmade devices hum in perpetual loops. Following field research in Indonesia, Bagus Pandega responds to the intertwined transformations of land, livelihood, and ecology under the pressures of resource extraction. Nickel, drawn from the red earth of Sulawesi and carried through global supply chains, anchors the works materially and as a witness to centuries of environmental and cultural change.

Excavation, in this context, is not only an industry but also an echo of earlier extractive economies, from the spice routes that mapped colonial ambitions to the plantation systems that replaced diverse forests with monocultures. Pandega does not present this history as a static fact. Instead, he reimagines it through mutable, responsive installations that shift over the course of the exhibition, mirroring the instability of the systems they evoke. In the exhibition Sumber Alam, nickel becomes a lens through which human experience and the natural world merge in a shifting interplay of sound and motion.

Living Signal

The exhibition begins on the staircase landing with Artificial Green by Nature Green v.5 (2025), created in collaboration with artist Kei Imazu. Across a six-meter-wide, three-meter-high canvas, Imazu’s painted rainforest glows in deep green, rooted in late nineteenth- century colonial botanical illustration, and emerges and disappears in repeating cycles. Whilst one machine paints, the other erases; the erasing machine translates the real-time bioelectrical signals of a living palm tree into brushstrokes, changes of pace, and washes of water. Over the course of three days, a single motif is painted — palm oil plantations, harvesting and transport labor, exotic rainforest plants, a trapped tiger, a hunted elephant, or an orangutan mother with her child — and then gradually erased over the following two days before the next motif comes into view.

The piece unfolds as a living score in which the plant sets the tempo, reflecting the precarious balance of Indonesian rainforests increasingly overtaken by palm oil plantations.

Biofeedback

At the core of the exhibition is L.O.O.P. (Loss Overgrown Organic Pulse) (2025), a thirty-meter-long conveyor belt modeled on industrial mining equipment. Nickel ore travels its length, controlled by tropical green plants whose biofeedback subtly adjusts the belt’s speed. At the end of each loop, the ore falls into a metal basin, producing a resonant strike. Piezoelectric sensors capture these vibrations and transmit them wirelessly to the exhibition’s final room. There, they animate Swara Sirna (2025), an arrangement of mechanical music boxes mounted on exotic Indonesian woods, remnants of forests now diminished or erased.

Swara Sirna plays fragments of popular songs, sending ripples of sound back toward the conveyor belt. The two installations form a closed circuit in which neither space contains the whole. Melodies fragment and reassemble as they travel, shifting with each repetition.

The visitor’s movement between them becomes an essential part of the loop’s operation.

Where Industry Meets Ecology

Between these two major installations is Lap of Extraction (2025), a participatory video work centered on a motorcycle used for haulage operations. In Indonesia, motorcycles are indispensable for navigating both dense cities and remote, uneven terrain.

Here, the vehicle becomes an interface for experiencing the bodily and environmental dynamics of extraction. Those who take to the saddle engage physically with a simulation of mining’s terrain and tempo, its shifting demands on workers, and its visible imprint on the land.

Across the exhibition, machines are not presented as dominating forces but as collaborators in a continuous exchange with natural systems. Nickel, hardwood, water, and the faint electrical currents of plants travel through delicate feedback loops, altering and being altered in return. The installations themselves behave like ecosystems, shaped by flows of energy, sound, and signals that move in multiple directions at once. Rather than fixing these processes into a single narrative, Sumber Alam leaves them open, almost unfinished. Ore travels endlessly in cycles, images dissolve and reform, and sounds travel as echoes between rooms. Extraction appears not as a frozen fact but as a restless pulse moving through forests, economies, and human bodies alike. In this shifting terrain, the works do not demand resolution. Instead, they invite a sustained attentiveness to the subtle negotiations between industry and ecology, to the possibility that these rhythms might one day align in ways that allow the Earth’s own systems to endure.