ABOUT
Philemon Mukarno is a performance artist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Over the past decade his work has moved between live art and body art — intense, uncompromising performances in which the body itself is the instrument and the stage is reduced to its essentials.
Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, Mukarno came to Rotterdam to study composition at Codarts University for the Arts and later at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. That training in music shapes every work he makes: rhythm, duration, and silence are treated as physical materials, and each performance is composed as rigorously as it is executed. Structure and time are never incidental.
Since 2015, Mukarno has presented work across the Netherlands and internationally — Indonesia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic (Prague), Spain (Ibiza), among others. Performances take place in theatres, galleries, and site-specific contexts — sometimes in public, among people who did not come looking for art. The audience is not a spectator but a condition: their proximity, attention, and discomfort are folded into the work itself.
Several concerns run persistently through the practice. One is duration: stillness held beyond comfort, repetition pushed toward transformation or exhaustion. Another is what might be called the naked situation — the performer stripped of costume, character, and acquired technique, left only with time and a body in space. Works such as Take, Eat my Body and Yoni engage directly with ritual, sacrifice, and the erotic charge of vulnerability made public. Kist confronts death and enclosure; Incarnation and Time Circle work with cycles of return. Other pieces — Air Shadow, Friction, Raining Stars — move through landscape or urban space, dissolving the frame that separates art from ordinary incident.
Mukarno also makes work in explicitly social and political registers. Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe restaged Manet's scandalous picnic as a live public act in Switzerland; Naked as Trans addressed gender, visibility, and the body's right to occupy space. Beras — rice, the staple food of the Indonesian archipelago — turned a material of daily sustenance into performance medium, tying the personal and the diasporic together. These works share a refusal to separate the aesthetic from the political, the formal from the felt.
This website is a partial archive of a practice that is, above all, live and ephemeral. Photographs and video traces document events that were always unrepeatable. Mukarno treats the archive not as the work's afterlife but as a distinct object — made from what the performance left behind, and carrying its own incompleteness honestly.
