On The Table (2024) '60 min

The Threshold of Exposure

Philemon Mukarno’s On The Table premiered in 2024 at Live Art Ireland. The title alone evokes intimacy and offering. The performance spans precisely sixty minutes, turning observation into ritual. A table dominates the space — a humble yet powerful object that holds the body as both symbol and sacrifice. The spectators face an inevitable moral question: are they consuming, or are they communing?

The minimalist setting accentuates vulnerability. Simple lighting, a wooden table, and an exposed body create a quiet storm of tension. Yet beyond the unease lies revelation. The performance’s raw immediacy invites participants into silent confrontation with their own gaze.

The Table as Altar

In this performance, the table rises to near-sacred status. Its surface rejects artifice and gleams of clinical detachment. Resting upon it, Mukarno’s nude body transforms into both subject and altar. The act of elevation calls for reverence, not voyeurism.

A thin towel intermittently shields portions of the skin, teasing the boundary between sanctity and exposure. Every detail—the grain of wood, the cool air, the still surface—becomes ritual material. This altar does not burn incense; it burns self-assurance, replacing it with raw, trembling truth.

Staging Flesh Against the World

Movement between settings shifts the performance’s spiritual gravity. Mukarno alternates between the table indoors and the gravel outdoors. The gravel tears at skin, while the wood cushions. These surfaces hold meaning: the interior represents structure; the exterior, surrender. Nudity bridges both.

The performer’s resilience becomes the performance’s essence. On gravel or wood, the naked body endures. Humanity endures. Mukarno uses physical discomfort to reconnect with the ancient earth, reminding onlookers that enlightenment is not found in luxury but in contact with the elemental.

Flesh as Honest Scripture

Close-ups reveal the unidealized skin: small flakes, yellow spots, unsoftened textures. Mukarno rejects saccharine sensuality. Instead, the body’s imperfections speak plainly, like scripture etched in flesh.

Through this insistence on honesty, the artist dismantles false beauty. The human form, devoid of masks, becomes a living testimony to time, fragility, and authenticity. The performance demands viewers face the biological truth, transforming discomfort into reverence.

Nakedness as Conduit

At the heart of On The Table, nakedness becomes a spiritual medium. Mukarno reimagines what it means to be unclothed—less exhibition, more revelation. Nudity, stripped of eroticism, becomes language.

Through this medium, the artist translates vulnerability into strength. The body, once objectified, returns to sacred architecture. Each viewer, confronted by endurance rather than seduction, glimpses the possibility of inner purification.

Shattering the Cultural Gaze

Western norms of bodily perfection crumble under Mukarno’s gaze. The performer offers no polish, no posed seduction. In its place stands stillness—a mirror of honesty. The work dismantles what the media has built: a disembodied, artificial ideal.

What emerges instead is presence: living flesh, breathing truth. The body, treated not as a commodity but as a conduit, invites respect. Mukarno redefines the nude, liberating it from centuries of objectification.

The Shadowbody and the Subconscious

Mukarno’s “Shadowbody” invokes collective memory and hidden emotion. His stillness opens a psychic channel, merging consciousness with intuition. The dark sensuality of his aesthetic uncovers repressed fears and buried desires.

This is not simply performance—it is excavation. Through motionless surrender, the artist maps the unseen territories of mind and matter. Viewers experience not a spectacle, but a mirror of their internal landscape.

Ancient Spirit, Modern Ritual

Though performed in Europe, On The Table draws its spiritual DNA from Asia. Mukarno’s perspective merges Indonesian spiritual thought with Western performance structures. This fusion reclaims the nude form from colonial readings. The body, once framed by external control, becomes sovereign once again.

By centering ritual and endurance, the performance transcends shock value. It instead repositions the nude as a sacred site—an invocation of ancestral wisdom and human unity.

Endurance and Ethical Witnessing

For exactly sixty minutes, the audience must decide how to look. The extended duration forces transformation—from spectator to participant. Every moment of sustained observation tests moral focus.

The performance dismantles quick judgment. Over time, nakedness ceases to provoke. It begins to breathe. The performance becomes collective meditation—a contract between artist and witness.

The Alchemy of Vulnerability

On The Table concludes in silence, yet its resonance lingers. Vulnerability emerges not as weakness, but as sublime power. Through endurance and humility, Mukarno turns skin into scripture, table into altar, and observation into empathy.

His one-hour act redefines live art not through spectacle but serenity. The performance suggests a bold new artistic direction: from deconstruction toward reconstruction—of self, of spirit, of gaze.