Ariel William Orah

hey friends in Toronto 🌶️ the transatlantic melodrama and euphoria continues 🌶️ really happy (and honestly a bit emotional) to finally bring HanomanN_O! to Toronto for the first time 🌶️ this project has been happening organically and fragmentedly for quite some time already, but this night will be the first time i present the longer audiovisual version publicly under the title 👉🏼 Bau Kentut! aka Subdued Residue! 🌶️ HanomanN_O grows from fragments of personal anxiety, identity turbulence, diaspora drama, geopolitics, ecological grief, and various emotional residues that have been lingering through different artistic researches, projects, and personal experiences over the years 🌶️ with this project i think i’m slowly trying to find a language and sound aesthetic to process all those fragments 🌶️ somehow dangdut, melancholy, kitschiness, cheesiness, experimental electronics, and old karaoke visual aesthetics become this strange cathartic medium for me 🌶️ a way to translate archive fragments, emotional leftovers, and polycrisis anxieties into something intimate, vulnerable, absurd, and alive 🌶️ and maybe that’s also why singing becomes important here 🌶️ after living for a long time in environments where singing often feels absent from daily life, i realized how much i miss the intimacy and vulnerability of expressing emotions directly through vocals 🌶️ somehow this project also becomes a way to reconnect with that 🌶️ really looking forward to sharing this night together with dearest @pjliveira presenting DESTERRO, the opening collaborative sound session by Terrarium’s Earth Punks @kikeyah @ehowwy , and also big shout out to @amrbowen and the whole team for helping sorting out this gig 🌶️ 👉 Terrarium 👉 77 Perth Ave, Toronto 🌶️ 👉 Thursday, May 14 👉 7pm–11pm

after a year of postponement due to visa and border regimes that still disproportionately restrict and filter movement from the global majority, we’re finally able to make this happen and bring our beloved repertoire #empathysupper to Canada for the first time 🌶️ on May 10, we’re part of Artseverywhere by @musagetesf , joining the closing event of the festival 👌 hosted by Ariel William Orah @_ravenative_ 🌶️ in collaboration with @pjliveira Pedro Oliveira 🌶️, with special guest @missngmusic 🌶️ shout to @amrbowen and team for the Invitation and care during the anxious visa drama 🫶🏼 this is the official description of Empathy Supper no. 16 👇🏾 for the closing event of the festival, join Berlin based artists Ariel William Orah and Pedro Oliveira for conversation, food preparation, an improvised concert with Orah, Oliveira and special guest Karen Ng, and a share meal in an era marked by deepening polarization, economic instability, and the enduring legacies of colonial distrust, how can communities navigate the delicate balance between trust and suspicion? how do historical legacies of colonial control continue to shape contemporary economic and socio political crises? how do diasporic groups construct alternative infrastructures of trust when state institutions and dominant communities treat them with skepticism? hosted by Berlin based Indonesian artist and community organizer Ariel William Orah, in collaboration with long time colleague Pedro Oliveira, Empathy Supper invites participants into an immersive exploration of these pressing questions through sound, listening, conversation, food preparation, and meal sharing. rooted in the ethos of Sōydivision’s Soy&Synth, Jendela Sonorama, and Empathy Suppers, this event extends an invitation to collectively reflect and engage in improvisation as a method of negotiation, empathy, and resilience 📍 10C, Fourth Floor (accessible by elevator) 🕔 May 10, 17:00–20:00 🎟️ free entry, registration required (link in bio)

🌿🐜 Terrarium is hosting @_ravenative_ and @pjliveira MAY 14th! 7pm to 11pm Terrariums’s Earth Punks invite you to come and resonate with us in collaborative sound making to open the night, followed by live performances by @_ravenative_ Ariel Orah presents Hanomann_O, an audiovisual live performance built from a growing archive of melancholic pop, dangdut-inspired songs, karaoke videos, text works, and political reflections developed across several years of artistic practice. Often considered one of the signature forms of Indonesian contemporary mainstream music, dangdut emerged through a complex historical synthesis of vernacular cultures of the Indonesian archipelago, Malay, Indian, Arab, and Western influences shaped through trade, migration, and colonialism. For Orah, the project functions as both personal memory and research interface, investigating extractive economies, geopolitical conflict, ecological crisis, migration, and the erosion of trust within today’s polycrisis. Placing voice at the forefront and working through an experimental electronics approach, Hanomann_O searches for the melancholiness and cheesiness within experimental electronic sound itself. The performance connects Orah’s background in sound art and visual archives with the diversified vernacular aesthetics of childhood and early life, framing the identity turbulence of living in diaspora for nearly half a lifetime. Moving beyond stereotypes of dangdut as merely kitschy or sentimental, the work reveals its potential as a sharp, emotional, and politically charged cultural language. + @pjliveira Pedro Oliveira presents DESTERRO  (noun, Portuguese: expulsion from a homeland; exile; solitude) an ongoing research on and poetic-technical exploration of contiguity as the withdrawal of consent to integrate, and of non-causality as an ethics of listening.

For the closing event of the festival, join Berlin-based artists Ariel William Orah and Pedro Oliveira for conversation, food preparation, an improvised concert with Orah, Oliveira and special guest Karen Ng, and a shared meal. In an era marked by deepening polarization, economic instability, and the enduring legacies of colonial distrust, how can communities navigate the delicate balance between trust and suspicion? How do historical legacies of colonial control continue to shape contemporary economic and socio-political crises? How do diasporic groups construct alternative infrastructures of trust when state institutions and dominant communities treat them with skepticism? Hosted by Berlin-based Indonesian artist and community organizer Ariel William Orah, in collaboration with long-time colleague Pedro Oliveira, Empathy Supper invites participants into an immersive exploration of these pressing questions through sound, listening, conversation, food preparation, and meal sharing. Rooted in the ethos of Sōydivision’s Soy&Synth, Jendela Sonorama, and Empathy Suppers, this event extends an invitation to collectively reflect and engage in improvisation as a method of negotiation, empathy, and resilience. The event is free. Please register in advance. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/empathy-supper-improvising-new-ecologies-of-trust-tickets-1986366000178 Sunday, May 10, 2026; 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm 10C, Fourth Floor - Accessible by elevator. This event strives to be fragrance-free. If possible, please avoid wearing perfumes and perfumed products (aftershave, essential oils, cologne, bug spray e.g.) to enable everyone’s fullest participation in the event. Thanks for taking care of each other.

TODAY 🌶️ looking forward to presenting this early phase of a new research project via @burningsilence.art at @spore.initiative (15:00) 👌 shout to @hannaguh @freeradicals.space for the invitation 👐🏽 👉🏼 come through for experimental storytelling on the dialectic of western utopias in pursuing energy transition, climate justice, and other sustainability mantra 🤷🏽 with parallel dystopic consequences in resource extraction and economic neocolonialism in the global majority 🤦🏽‍♂️ through the lens of indonesia 1967, the year when the Undang Undang Penanaman Modal Asing (Foreign Investment Law) was introduced, followed by the Geneva conference organized by western corporate actors, reopening indonesia and exposing its resources to global capital from nutmeg to nickel 👻 from the Dutch East India Company to the European Union 🤡 marking a shift from generals in war 👉🏼 to technocrats in the economy with figures like the Berkeley Mafia helping structure and legitimize these processes 👀 all of this is accompanied sonically by the mutation of indonesia’s most iconic contemporary musical form #dangdut 🪩 💃🏽🎸 — ( Subdued Residue a.k.a BAU KENTUT ) is part of the ongoing artistic research EXTRA K↔K LANG focusing on how sound intertwines with economic extractivism and its afterlives 💩 see you there 🌶️

“Suarasa” returns today on AS_SŌY Radio 🌶️ 17:00 CET via https://soydivision.berlin/assoy-radio/ 📻 Rooted in three Indonesian words, sua meaning to meet, suara meaning voice or sound, and rasa meaning taste, feeling, and essence, the show moves between kitchen, conversation, and sonic curation, where small gestures like cooking, listening, remembering, and improvising unfold and food, sound, and storytelling intertwine as shared languages. Today’s revival edition taps into a last lost archive that never been aired, featuring Herlambang Bayu Aji a.k.a Wayang Rajakaya 👉🏼 @herlambang_bayu_aji 🤟🏾 On the menu by @_ravenative_ 👇🏾 👉🌶️ Sambal Dabutabal, a special collaboration with Morphine Records chef Rabih Beaini, blending Manado dabu dabu with mutabal, a smoky Lebanese eggplant dip 👅 @morphine_records_raum @rabih__beaini 💄 👉🍚🌿 Nasi liwet petai 👉🍗🔥 Ayam bakar “rantau”, grilled chicken marinated with Indonesian kecap manis and Turkish biber salçası Full recipes will be uploaded within the episode archive on our website. AS_SOY on air transmissions live from &lainlainlab at @movingpoets Novilla, supported by Berlin Senat Basisförderung, part of the 2 year curatorial proposition TRUSTPICTION 🫀👀 #assoyradio #assoyssuarrasa #assoyfeireabend

🌶️📡 Global Melodrama — Episode 01 now online The archive of the first Global Melodrama broadcast on ASSOY Radio is now available to listen back. This episode began as a small experiment on the ASSOY Radio morning show. The idea itself grew from an ongoing conversation since last year between @_ravenative_ and @asarela.dewi , thinking about how television dramas from the 1990s 👄 especially Indonesian sinetron 😌 might be examined as a cultural and sonic archive capturing the social atmosphere of their time. With the recent revival of ASSOY Radio, the morning show became a kind of participatory research interface to start testing this idea. Listeners were invited via Instagram and Telegram to share songs from television dramas they remembered growing up with. The response was immediate. What was initially planned as a short segment quickly expanded into a two-hour broadcast with nearly 30 tracks. The playlist travelled across multiple television cultures: Indonesian sinetron, Latin American telenovelas from Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, television dramas from Thailand and Nepal, and East Asian series from Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Several listeners also shared songs from animated series and children’s television of the same era, including Doraemon and Rurouni Kenshin. The result became something unexpected: a collective listening archive of television memory, assembled through contributions from listeners. This broadcast opens a new research direction on ASSOY Radio exploring television melodrama as a global cultural phenomenon. The second episode, focusing specifically on Indonesian sinetron, is also already online — more about that in the next post. If you grew up with television dramas from the 80s or 90s and want to share memories, suggest songs, or contribute to future episodes, we would love to hear from you. Comment below, send us a DM, or write to 📩 [email protected] Listen back here: https://soydivision.berlin/sarapan-01-global-tv-melodrama/ 🌶️ #assoyradio

Felt so alive to do regular live radio 📻 again via @soydivision.berlin #assoyradio new residency studio at @movingpoets NOVILLA 👀 mesmerizing those gold old times at @ozradiobandung 2006-2011 🫦 The radio is now on air via https://soydivision.berlin/assoy-radio/ till 13:00 🕚 #nowplaying🎧 is our #soyandsynth archive but afterwards will play curated siesta tunes till 13:00 🔊 among others are tunes and waves from these cuties @cluster_lizard @ishallsinguntilmylandisfree @senyawa_musik @researchandwaves @praedband @morphine_records_raum etc etc 🔊 From next week the on air rhythm of #assoyradio will be hopefully fixed every mo-wed-fri with rotation of 3 blocks (sarapan-siesta-Feierabend) (morning-noon-evening) which each block will on aired our current signature shows such #assoyanochronism assoy-retrospeculative , SSUARASA, and couple new shows and host in upcoming weeks 🫦 hit me up when u have ideas for the radio 📻 On air always via https://soydivision.berlin/assoy-radio/ and take a look on diverse shows when we treat radio also as research 🧐 interface and social lubricants ✌🏽

📻🌶 ASSOY Radio — Refresh Debut This Friday from 17:00 (CET) #assoyradio enters a new phase and activates its new semi-permanent setup inside soydivision’s &lainlainlab residency at @movingpoets Novilla for the next two years 🌶 We open with two new program series: 👉🏼 17:00 — Anachronism #01 @mermasuelo — Siento 💕 Anachronism is dedicated to the album as a complete work. In a listening culture shaped by skipping, playlists, and acceleration, the album can feel out of time - too long, too slow, too demanding. This program leans into that condition. Each episode presents one full-length album played from beginning to end - accompanied by the artist’s spoken reflections and annotations. The music is not fragmented. The arc remains intact. Voice and sound move alongside each other without breaking continuity. Listening as a durational act - unhurried, attentive, resistant to optimization. 👉🏼 18:00 — Retrospeculative #01 with @pjliveira , @asarela.dewi & @_ravenative_ 💕 What happens when an open studio becomes a radio show? Artists speak from the middle of their process - not presenting finished works, but reflecting on what shaped them and speculating on where they might go next. Looking backward and forward at the same time, each episode unfolds through questions, shifts, doubts, and emerging directions. An audible studio visit - work still forming - thinking out loud 🌶 This refresh marks the beginning of a two-year radio presence inside &lainlainlab - expanding ASSOY Radio as a space for deep listening, process-based dialogue, and shared artistic reflection. 🗓 Friday - 17:00 CET 📍 Moving Poets Novilla 🔊 Streaming via ASSOY Radio - link in bio &lainlain Lab is part of TRUSTPICTION (2025–2027) and supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion through the Zweijährige Basisförderung für Gruppen, Einzelkünstlerinnen und –künstler. 🌶

Dear splendid souls 🌶️ We invite you to Tumpeng Tindih 04 — an open evening by sōydivision at @movingpoets Novilla, Berlin 🏠 on 7 March 2026 🫦 This gathering marks a soft launch of the next phase of TRUSTPICTION (2025–27) and the first public introduction of &lainlainLab 👉🏼 a working and residency space in between, where reflection becomes transmission and listening becomes a way of moving forward 🔊📻. As we approach our 10th year as a constellation, we keep tuning in 🦷 During the evening, we will share the latest mutation of TAHANGUENTAR 🔊 — a work that grew through an internal, serendipitous flirtation within sōydivision: from #soyandsynth, to #jendelasonorama, and into TAHANGUENTAR as performance and extended cinema (premiere 2024, restaging 2025 at @sinematranstopia ). The work has continued to ferment and has now mutated into an audio-visual-interactive-sonic sculpture in the form of an installative zine, developed by @_ravenative_ , @pjliveira , and @asarela.dewi , and will be presented to the public for the first time on this occasion 📻. This edition is also shaped by a recent rupture. Earlier this year, books were burned in front of Novilla 🔥📚 — a reminder of how fragile shared spaces of knowledge, care, and coexistence can be, and why gathering and listening together still matters 🔊. 👉 Please refer to our previous and pinned post for more context. Tumpeng Tindih speaks to layered realities — tumpeng as a symbol of gratitude and togetherness, tindih as pressure, overlap, and weight — celebration and tension coexisting in the same space 🫀 🌶️ Food note: We will prepare tumpeng rice and sambal 🌶️. You are warmly invited to bring a small dish to share. If you don’t bring food, a small donation is welcome — not as obligation, but as care and reciprocity. 📍 Novilla, Hasselwerderstraße 22, 12439 Berlin-Schöneweide • 🗓️ 7 March 2026, from 18:00 📻 Note: The building-up phase for this public event begins from 27 February, activated from within &lainlainLab through warming-up frequencies by ASSOY Radio 🔊📻. The ON AIR schedule will be updated in the coming days — stay tuned. 🔗 More info → check link in bio

Hello, this is Ariel writing. It took me almost a week to post this because it’s been hard to find words for the anger, sadness, fear, and confusion that followed what happened here. I live and work in the same building where this happened. My studio is here, my kids play nearby, and I was the one who filed the police report. This is not an abstract place for me. At the beginning of this year, books were burned here twice. The first incident was witnessed by my studio mate @pisitakun , the second by his partner @too_shy_to_live , who also documented it. At the same spot, far-right stickers were found targeting LGBTQ+ people, leftist spaces, migrants, and cultural work, alongside nationalist symbols marking intimidation. Book burning is not random vandalism. In Germany, it is historically tied to fascism and the erasure of knowledge and communities. Combined with these symbols, it felt like an act of intimidation, a message about who is considered welcome. At the same time, we were just beginning something new. This year we started occupying a room here as a collective lab for co-creating, documenting, publishing, and broadcasting practices, with a small radio and a zine and self-publishing space. A place for making books, not burning them. That contradiction made me angry and afraid, but it also made things clear. One act tries to erase knowledge. The other insists on producing it together. This post is a refusal to normalize what happened and a call for solidarity. Solidarity with @movingpoets , with this space, and with everyone affected by hatred and intimidation. If you resonate with my and our work, please stand with us. Show up. Stay attentive. This is only the beginning. From the last week of February to the first week of March, we will softly launch our next two years of work here, starting with the radio and zine room and ending with a public gathering on 7 March. Save the date. Come by. Bring people. Wear colors. It’s cold outside 🤍

It has been a meaningful week of reflecting🪩 together on how the current global polycrisis shapes our trust 🫦 and suspicion 🫣 toward ourselves and others🦷 For me, this kind of artistic lab format is essential to my artistic practice. It helps me stay sane and relevant, creating space for empathy exercises that are often missing in artistic production, which is so frequently driven by capitalist, progress-oriented logic (and those ridiculous KPIs). The pressure to deliver pristine and “innovative” outcomes is always high 🌋 Thank you to my dear Team Lab members for the collective learning and for trusting this process 💕 and shout to @_dtjung and @mirahlaline for the invitation 🙌🏼 If you’re curious to see a Gen-Z take on my theme TRUSTPICTION : VER/MISS-TRAUEN, explored through experimental media such as sound sculpture 🐙 on stage, come by to @deutschestheaterberlin today from 17:00 🔊 All images are taken from various moments throughout the process this week. #trustpiction