Coast to coast
How Leyla Stevens captures the geography and culture of her homelands — from the Sunshine Coast to Balinese old growth forests — in her hypnotic video works.
Written by Chloe Borich
Coastlines have mapped the contours of Leyla Stevens’ life. The artist and researcher, who grew up on Gubbi Gubbi Country on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, would travel back and forth to visit family in Kuta in Southern Bali. She later traced her way south, settling on Gadigal Land (Sydney) for twenty years. Today, Stevens enters our Zoom call from her new home in Footscray, Naarm/Melbourne, where she’s recently relocated with her young family to take up a position as a Fine Art Lecturer at Monash University. Her address isn’t far from St Kilda beach, the water’s edge still near, still rippling across the surface of her work today.
Stevens’ video art explores the complex histories and dualities of her Australian-Balinese heritage. Reimagining storytelling traditions through dance and performance, Stevens gives body to Balinese myth making, breathing new life into forgotten archives and ancestral lineages. Rooted in research and community collaborations, her work rewrites the dominant narratives that have otherwise come to define her family’s native homeland. Linking the past with the present, her work considers the reparative potential of artmaking, leading with localised stories that see her recover displaced archives, unpack environmental issues and redress histories of political violence.
While artistry has long been embedded in Balinese culture, through ceremony, ritual and dance, her small coastal hometown in Australia left Stevens hungry for more. “When you did find out about some version of culture that was offering an alternative to what was around you, whether it was a book or a musician, it kind of felt like fate,” Stevens reflects with a smile. Fate likely played a part in her travelling to the city to visit the first Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (1993), an ambitious exhibition of contemporary art from all around Australia, Asia and the Pacific. Positioning Australia as a part of the Asia-Pacific region, the APT reinforced positive messaging about diversity and multiculturalism in contrast to the conservative political rhetoric emerging from Queensland at the time. The experience had a profound effect on Stevens, enabling her to connect cultural dots between her distanced homelands.
As a teenager, another revelation arrived in the form of a film SLR camera, instantly sparking a deep love for the medium. “Using a camera is a way of observing the world, but it’s also a framing device,” Stevens observes, “you’re selecting what gets seen and what doesn't.” Captivated by the miraculous process of documenting latent images on film, Stevens was drawn to the magic of later revealing something that had been “buried”. Her transition into video was a natural progression to capture “an extended moment that photography couldn’t give.” This evolved into her expanded documentary approach, allowing focus to be placed on her growing areas of research into archives, image histories and collective memories, often in response to specific places. “An overarching methodology that I use in a lot of my work is a kind of reading back into official stories and listening to ghosts, listening to things that aren’t always registering immediately,” explains Stevens. “You’re looking for what has been made absent and marginalised, who’s been censored out and why.”
Leyla Stevens, animation still from PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest (2024), featuring painting by Ida Bagus Putu Tantra & Ida Bagus Nyoman Sasak from the collection of R Lemelson (Ex-Mead-Bateson Collection)
“An overarching methodology that I use in a lot of my work is a kind of reading back into official stories and listening to ghosts, listening to things that aren’t always registering immediately,” explains Stevens. “You’re looking for what has been made absent and marginalised, who’s been censored out and why.”
Production still,PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest (2024), photograph by Dodik Cahyendra
Following the rise of diaspora led art conversations in Australia, an institutional awareness and sense of responsibility has echoed the trajectory of Stevens' work over the last six years, which has only galvanised the artist’s commitment to process and discipline. Most recently she was commissioned to develop a major video work, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest(2024), for The Art Gallery of New South Wales. The project began four years ago when Stevens encountered a relatively unknown collection of Balinese black and white monochromatic paintings from the 1930s at the Australian Museum. Made in the village of Batuan, they depicted scenes of folklore and ceremony passed down over time. Over 1000 works were originally commissioned by North American and English anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, which have since been dispersed throughout public and private collections around the globe. “The paintings stayed in Mead’s office for forty years,” says Stevens, “For me, the loss is to understand that these precious histories have been kept away in these spaces that are very hard to access for the people who have most connection to them. Yes you’re preserving Balinese culture, but for who?”
“For me, the loss is to understand that these precious histories have been kept away in these spaces that are very hard to access for the people who have the most connection to them. Yes, you’re preserving Balinese culture — but for who?”
Recovering the works through her practice, Stevens began to make her selections, resonating with the forest imagery that originated from the Tantri – Indonesia’s Thousand and One Nights tale. Tantriis the name of the woman narrating, who tells fables to a badly behaved King over the course of a night. In PAHIT MANIS, Tantriis evoked through a contemporary female dalang, a puppeteer of a traditional wayang kulit, Ida Ayu Sri Widnyanyi. “I was interested in thinking about Tantriand how to show her. I realised she had to be a dalang, because that’s one of the oldest storytelling forms in Bali,” Stevens explains, “It’s a role that holds a lot of power. Depending on their status, a dalang is considered similar to a priest, practicing a sacred art form.”
The film takes place beneath the canopy of a banyan tree in one of Bali’s last old growth forests. Here, Widnyanyi begins her performance, channeling the animal spirit protectors who inhabit the natural world to share their enduring hope and grief about the destruction of their home. Awakening the sacred puppets, sounds of the forest fill the room before she begins her slow, hypotonic tale. As she speaks, the timbre of her voice grows louder, textured, resonant, all consuming. Text translations illuminate the bottom of the screen: The trees are falling/How can I protect what is lost?Pans of the forest envelop the screen, transporting the viewer into vivid greenery. Contemporary animations of the Batuan paintings come alive, scenes play out in various states of reverie, distress and violence, each chapter growing more urgent than the next.
Leyla Stevens, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest(2024),single channel film,video excerpt.
Stevens tells me there’s always unanswered questions that emerge at the end of a project, foreshadowing new discoveries to be made. It’s this curiosity and commitment to learning that continues to drive her research, allowing her to harness the untapped potential that lies dormant in archives around the world. Through her lens, she channels a powerful sensitivity that reactivates these stories, presenting not only complex understandings of Balinese culture, but the authority of song, dance and spoken word. Stevens introduces her audiences to rituals that trace back through time yet speak to our contemporary condition, ever ghostly in their essence.