Vira explores the socio-cultural relationship between the materiality of spices and the exoticisation of the Asian female 'Other' through visual recipes.
Through a multidisciplinary practice, she uses video-making, ink-making with natural cooking ingredients, expanded abstract paintings, and recipe-making to bring forward the contradictions in bodily autonomy by focusing on the textures of the senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.
Drawing from the Indonesian medicinal practice jamu, she investigates how its traditions, materiality, and praxis impact the physiology of Indonesian women and continue to perpetuate the entrenched image of the sexualised and inanimate Asian female body.
This body of work opens a space to question concepts of femininity and what it would be like to subvert the colonial gaze in our ‘postcolonial’ world.
