GALLERY 1
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OPENING EVENT
Saturday 21 November, 2pm
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exhibition dates
NOV 21 - DEC 13
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Interwoven explores the ruptures and reconnections that define Timor-Leste’s history, identity, and the lives of its people. Building on themes explored over the past decade, the exhibition brings together existing and new paintings with an installation made from Tais, Timor-Leste’s traditional handwoven fabric.
Disconnection—between people, between generations, between past and present—has become a lived reality. In its place, imposed systems divide, isolate and fracture community. Yet our survival has always depended on something else: collective strength, deep care, and interdependence.
Woven throughout the artist’s paintings and installation, Tais is more than textile; it is memory, protection and belonging. It unites clans, carries ancestral stories, and connects us to land, livelihood and each other. But its threads have been pulled apart by nearly five centuries of colonisation, occupation and foreign interference.
During the Indonesian Occupation, Timor-Leste’s Resistance was organised across three interwoven fronts: clandestine, diplomatic and guerrilla, symbolised by Timor-Leste’s three tallest mountains: Ramelau, Kablaki and Matebian. Yet there are many smaller mountains we don’t mention, representing ordinary people—mothers, children, farmers and fishermen—who bore the cost of war in silence. They held families together, birthed and buried children, and provided food and shelter, sustaining life under unthinkable strain.
Interwoven is for them. For the missing threads, whose labour and loss remain unrecognised in national narratives, holidays and pension schemes. While official histories have privileged male guerrilla combatants, this exhibition makes space for the lives and contributions of those too often left out of the story.
Through painting and installation, Interwoven becomes a visual act of repair: an offering to the past and a call to the future. It asks how we might reweave what has been unravelled through culture, family and everyday acts of self-determination—and ensure that future generations can see these missing threads in the fabric of our stories.
ABOUT ALFE RM
I am a painter and illustrator but my art practice extends to sculpture, street art and performance. My process is shaped by experimentation, adaptability, and community and I often work with limited materials. This constraint has been a creative catalyst, encouraging me to develop original techniques and visual languages. My work is grounded in lived experience, cultural memory and personal and collective histories—shaped by Timor-Leste’s long struggle for sovereignty, our ongoing pursuit of self-determination, and the richness of our Indigenous identity. Through my art, I explore how these forces live within us and continue to shape who we are.