What Binds Me to This Land
Ames Yavuz Singapore
2025

A conversation about land, territories, language, and the multivalent possibilities of all that is natural and imagined, ‘What Binds Me to This Land’ brings together a diverse group of international artists that possess a distinct desire to recreate visual tableaus that allude to their personal and historico-political encounters with the natural world. Operating within systems of structured power, memory and legacies, these precepts often inform their modes of artmaking and storytelling. Through embedded stories of migration, colonisation, extraction and spirituality, these artists shape and reclaim narratives from landscapes of their collective past, present and future.

In Natalie Sasi Organ’s paintings, familial kinship and fractured traditions come to the forefront. She renders the moment of cultural slippage and the counter-gesture of retrieval with quiet precision. Slipping through the fingers shows betel nuts hanging from an outstretched hand, their descent not dramatic but almost imperceptible: a slow leak in the vessel of intergenerational knowledge. I knelt to gather depicts the aftermath — not of loss, but of response: the body lowered, the gaze redirected downward, as if hands poised to collect what the lineage failed to pass on. The works emerge from Sasi Organ’s dialogue with her grandmother, who ceased chewing betel decades ago under social and political pressure, and only now through the artist’s inquiry begins to share what was withheld. The betel nut, once central to rituals of womanhood, storytelling, and kinship, has been recast as obsolete or even criminal. Yet Sasi Organ treats its fall not as an endpoint, but as an invitation: to kneel, to look closely, to gather not just the object alone, but the silence around it. Together, they trace the arc from absence to action where the artist becomes both witness and weaver of a thread nearly broken.