A Bite of Berlin

• Opening: 05.11.2026 | 6 PM
• Exhibition: 06.–29.11.2026 | 10 AM–7 PM
• Closed every Monday

Posters, flyers, stickers, and public notices: what do they reveal? Grab a bite of Berlin through Sukma Smita and Sigit Darmawan Pratama’s lens.

GoetheHaus Jakarta's walls have been silent observers of how cultural exchange has shaped Goethe-Institut Indonesien’s work. By chance or by invitation, ideas and audiences have crossed paths here for years. Our premises are as German as they are multicultural in content. The upcoming exhibition continues that habit. We will exhibit Sukma Smita and Sigit Darmawan Pratama's experience of Berlin.

During Sukma Smita’s time in Berlin through REFLEKT residency programme 2025, she has been drawn to the way the city speaks through its walls. Walking becomes a practice of noticing details, tracing layers, and observing the street; a favourite method of hers during the residency. It also leads her to encounters with her neighbours, through which she gathers stories while grounding herself in the neighbourhood. In Wedding and Moabit, she came across a wall plastered with overlapping stickers, flyers, posters, and public notices that shout, whisper, intersect, repeat, and at times contradict one another. Ideas, aspirations, and ideologies advanced by multiple actors, from government bodies to grassroots groups, circulate on the same surface. A daycare poster about diversity sits next to an anti-racist sticker; a commercial advertisement borrows the language of activism. Such juxtapositions, for her, suggest that printed matter does not merely convey information or operate as visual expression. It also exposes the tensions of a city and shapes how that city is read, remembered, and experienced.

Through different encounters, Sigit Darmawan Pratama, an art exhibition specialist and installation artist, found a shared energy between Berlin and his own practice. He was drawn to the city’s many rhythms: more open, experimental and deliberate than Jakarta’s energetic, layered atmosphere. Berlin could feel cold, rough and distant, yet warm and welcoming at the same time. For Sigit, this tension mirrors his artistic practice, which moves between the raw and the refined, the structured and the spontaneous, the cold and the warm. At the heart of both is a sense of individual expression and honesty. In Berlin, materials and spaces are allowed to speak for themselves, with the process becoming part of the work rather than something hidden behind its final form. Sigit brings this experience back to Jakarta, combining the qualities he encountered in Berlin with the sensibility of the city he calls home.

In their joint presentation, Sukma and Sigit will exhibit their observations and reproduce these encounters through sight, sound, and taste.