Esty Wika Silva

Esty Wika Silva was born and raised in West Kalimantan and is currently based in Yogyakarta. Her practice explores vulnerability, identity, and their entanglements with ecological and social issues through research-based artistic processes. She is actively engaged in community work, particularly with Bakudapan Food Study Group, Struggles for Sovereignty, and Sejawat Merawat initiatives that focus on ecological, social, political, and cultural justice, as well as care work within activism. Through her artistic practice, she seeks to examine and navigate the duality between vulnerability and privilege in her position as an individual, an artist, and a member of a community.

Title: I Want to Survive But Capitalism Won’t Let Me

When larger systems such as capitalism regulate almost every dynamic within the environments we inhabit, basic individual rights at a smaller scale are often deemed insignificant, rendering us vulnerable to systematic oppression and neglect. Under such conditions, the issues we face become increasingly complex, dulling our sensitivity to vulnerability itself both within our own bodies and within our (also hierarchical) relationships with others and the environment.

Within a system that continually makes us feel as though we are never enough, I seek to create space for feelings of exhaustion, anger, and bitterness to be present with critical awareness while remaining attentive and sensitive. This work emerges from those emotions feelings that I continue to reflect upon and navigate. The desire to survive, often colliding with the realities of limited, damaged, or development-altered spaces, sharpens vulnerability and further narrows life choices.

Drawing from my lived experience of the Kalimantan landscape since childhood, I attempt to trace how the wild and the ‘other’ including myselfdevise strategies for survival. This work becomes a space to record and re-examine forms of vulnerability and to map what remains silenced in personal and everyday life, opening conversations about strategies of living, and about how we might care for and support one another.

Dimesion : 72 x 72 cm, 60 x 40 cm, 60 x 40 cm

Medium : Hand Embroidery

Year : 2025