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shasti (Andara Shastika) is a Jakarta-born multimedia, performance and sound artist and community organiser based in Kassel. Through the digital and physical distortions of voice, video and 3D image-making, Shasti works with aesthetic expressions of ghostliness as a political visual language, haunting as a method of rewriting and reclaiming, curse as a practice of critique and the exploration of utopia in the supernatural, the diabolical and the monstrous.

shasti studied Visual Arts at Kunsthochschule Kassel under Mounira Al-Solh, Mathilde ter Heijne, Johanna Schaffer, and Pauline Curnier Jardinier; a master-school art student of Johanna Schaffer and Mounira Al-Solh; and is now participant of the Graduate School for Moving Image and the Department of Sound under Mario de Vega. Shasti is part of the Kassel-based collective TERRARISTA TV, has worked for Yugoexport, co-organized BPOC Kassel festivals and recently the INDOQUEER DIASPORA CLUBNIGHT with Insan Larasati, Party Office and ook Project. Right now Shasti is working for Prof. Dr. Swantje Lichtenstein and Prof. Maria Schleiner at the University of Applied Sciences Dusseldorf as Artistic Assistant in the research project ComArts (Community Arts).

shasti’s recent shows include collective works with TERRARISTA TV and dgtl fmnsm in Kassel, Cologne, Berlin, Stuttgart and Dresden.

TERRARISTA TV
Project ComArts


Research Project: Familiars

Reimagining ghost story through mixed realities, transmedial practice and the politics of memories and seeing.
 
2024
360° video, 11 min.
virtual ghost world: songxin



Exhibition views GBB_edits #3: Desire Across the Disciplines,  Exhibition Area Kunsthochschule Kassel 2024. Photos: Lucas Melzer

Familiars is a VR-video work from my research about ghost stories. Working with immersive and digital art productions – like contemporary electronic music, 3D, and virtual reality – I tried to reflect on what it means to tell ghost stories in a disenchanted world, to sit with the complexity of otherness and the desire for familiarity in the diaspora. I started by approaching members of the Indonesian diaspora in Germany, to retell each other stories that normally would have been considered fictitious. In collaboration with artist songxin, a 3D world is imagined and created based on the familiar symbolism in our ghost stories. An environment of collaborative processes, where I envision these memories can thrive. Along with the fragments of stories I collected, the 3D world also presents my manifesto on how ghosts can inspire us to imagine a different understanding of seeing and building relations.





Familiars (video stills)