“I learned to crochet in art school, initially to make fabric sculptures, and it has stayed with me ever since — through more sculptures, and through durational performances where the act of making became the work itself. My crochet hook is my oldest tool. For me, crocheting has always been about time: the slow accumulation of loops, the rhythm of repetition. But it is also about material intimacy — something familiar in the hand, and something that bears the trace of the hand.”
Happy Birthday to Bea Camacho @ibea.camacho ! Wishing you another great year woven from meaningful encounters, fulfilling work, and moments that stay close to the hand and heart.
Image 2-4
Efface
2008
Single-channel video
11 hours
Image 5
Artist Portrait
📸: Neal Oshima
#fostgallery #beacamacho #performanceart #crochet #contemporaryart
Mirrorball: Reflections on Portraiture
Artist Focus: Bea Camacho
Camacho’s Self-Portrait series is about abstracting, indexing, and encoding the human body. She depicts lines measuring the circumference of her hands or entire body at half-inch intervals, drawn to scale. Camacho makes use of these intervals because the spacings between the lines are sufficient in suggesting a bodily form, but not enough to entail a literal translation; balancing the image as both minimal yet recognisable.
With the Quantified Self movement and society’s growing obsession with data, Camacho observes that people have a growing desire to measure, to quantify, and to translate life into concrete data points. Camacho casts doubt on the these attempts to understand the human body through numbers and indices, suggesting that not everything can be represented or translated into data. To her, there will always be things that cannot be empirically measured. The images she presents are as much about what is not represented, about the gaps between the lines.
@ibea.camacho
View this series in our current exhibition, Mirrorball: Reflections on Portraiture, running until 14 March 2026.
Self-Portrait (Circumference of Body at ½” Intervals)
2010
Archival print on 100% cotton paper
Edition of 5 + 1 Artist’s Proof, H114.3 x W172.7 cm
Self-Portrait (Circumference of Both Hands at ½” Intervals)
2010
Digital print on archival paper
Edition of 5, H28 x W53 cm
Image 1 and Image 3 by @lavchang
#beacamacho #mirrorballreflectionsonportraiture #contemporaryart #singapore #fostgallery
1 x 1 x 1
June 26 - July 29, 2025
Fost Gallery
1 Lock Road, Gillman Barracks, Singapore
Group exhibit with works by:
Jan Balquin
Bea Camacho
Jon Chan
Lavender Chang
Adeline Kueh
Phi Phi Oanh
Donna Ong
On view now at Fost Gallery, until July 29.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, “The Imaginary” (New York Routledge, 2010) pp126-127
Archival print on 100% cotton paper
2010
—-
Bea Camacho’s Sartre, Jean-Paul, “The Imaginary” (New York: Routledge, 2010) series (2010) deconstructs the conceptual scheme of word language and instead presents them as a formal arrangement of characters. The work is based on a print edition of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, 1940) where Camacho counts all the characters in selected pages of the original text and re-arranges them in alphabetical order, stripping the text of its meaning. Maintaining the page layout of the original text, content is transformed into form and language’s implicit expression is emptied out. What is retained that is still intelligible are the page numbers and headings, keeping the reference to the original text.
In The Imaginary, Sartre posits a clear distinction between perception and imagination: perception involves observation of particular objects with our senses and is necessarily incomplete, while imagination completes the awareness of the object but is “irreal”—we fill in the blanks with knowledge from past experiences and base on our intentions toward it. All images (and perceived objects) are thus “irreal” in order to be conceivable. The world is constituted according to how we ascribe it. Through re-presenting text as an image composed of a systematic arrangement of alphabets, Camacho’s series removes the intention of the author and invites re-imagination. The work in this way becomes a perception that allows imagination to take place.
Excerpt from Discrete Encodings (2019) Exhibition Essay written by Khim Ong @ong.khim
On view now at Fost Gallery, until July 29.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, “The Imaginary” (New York Routledge, 2010) pp126-127
Archival print on 100% cotton paper
2010
—-
Bea Camacho’s Sartre, Jean-Paul, “The Imaginary” (New York: Routledge, 2010) series (2010) deconstructs the conceptual scheme of word language and instead presents them as a formal arrangement of characters. The work is based on a print edition of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, 1940) where Camacho counts all the characters in selected pages of the original text and re-arranges them in alphabetical order, stripping the text of its meaning. Maintaining the page layout of the original text, content is transformed into form and language’s implicit expression is emptied out. What is retained that is still intelligible are the page numbers and headings, keeping the reference to the original text.
In The Imaginary, Sartre posits a clear distinction between perception and imagination: perception involves observation of particular objects with our senses and is necessarily incomplete, while imagination completes the awareness of the object but is “irreal”—we fill in the blanks with knowledge from past experiences and base on our intentions toward it. All images (and perceived objects) are thus “irreal” in order to be conceivable. The world is constituted according to how we ascribe it. Through re-presenting text as an image composed of a systematic arrangement of alphabets, Camacho’s series removes the intention of the author and invites re-imagination. The work in this way becomes a perception that allows imagination to take place.
Excerpt from Discrete Encodings (2019) Exhibition Essay written by Khim Ong @ong.khim
Bea Camacho is a visual artist who works in installation, performance, and video, reflecting upon memory, distance, and absence. As part of our first movement for 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳, Camacho performed 𝘌𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦, a three-day-long durational performance that develops from Camacho’s single action of crocheting herself into a white carpet with white yarn until her body is entirely enveloped.
The white carpet, installed against white walls, gradually swallows the artist into the gallery’s architecture, performing a visual dissolution between body and environment. 𝘌𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦 explores the endurance of time itself, about how the quiet rhythm of a repetitive action can evoke both stillness and transformation in the unfolding of minutes, then hours.
Bea Camacho
𝘌𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦 (𝘙𝘖𝘏, 𝘑𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘢)
7 - 9 February 2025
Photograph by Farid Renais Ghimas @faridrenais
Image courtesy of The Artist and ROH
__
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳
25 January - 13 April 2025
Aditya Novali, Albertho Wanma, Bea Camacho, Budi Santoso, Charwei Tsai, chi too, Kate Newby, Kazuko Miyamoto, Kitty Taniguchi, Mella Jaarsma, Mira Rizki Kurnia, Oototol, Orawan Arunrak, Rab, Raha Raissnia, Tcheu Siong, Tith Kanitha
Accompanied with texts by:
Denise Lai, Erwin Romulo, Harry Burke, Hung Duong, Innas Tsuroiya, Mara Coson, Martin Germann
ROH
Jalan Surabaya 66
Jakarta 10310
Efface (ROH, Jakarta)
Live performance
February 7-9, 2025
—-
There is no center
January 25 - April 13, 2025
Curated by Denise Lai
@rohprojects
📹 @xplacidacidx
Efface (ROH, Jakarta)
Live performance
February 7-9, 2025
——
There is no center
January 25 - April 13, 2025
Curated by Denise Lai
@rohprojects
📷 @jntrtdj
ROH is delighted to announce Bea Camacho’s durational performance, 𝘌𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦, as part of our first movement for 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳.
The three-day-long durational performance develops from Camacho’s single action of crocheting herself into a white carpet with white yarn until her body is entirely enveloped. The white carpet, installed against white walls, gradually swallows the artist into the gallery’s architecture, performing a visual dissolution between body and environment. 𝘌𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦 explores the endurance of time itself, about how the quiet rhythm of a repetitive action can evoke both stillness and transformation in the unfolding of minutes, then hours.
Bea Camacho
Efface (𝘙𝘖𝘏, 𝘑𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘢)
7 - 9 February 2025
1 - 6 pm
—
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳
25 January - 13 April 2025
Aditya Novali, Albertho Wanma, Bea Camacho, Budi Santoso, Charwei Tsai, chi too, Kate Newby, Kazuko Miyamoto, Kitty Taniguchi, Mella Jaarsma, Mira Rizki Kurnia, Oototol, Orawan Arunrak, Rab, Raha Raissnia, Tcheu Siong, Tith Kanitha
Accompanied with texts by:
Denise Lai, Erwin Romulo, Harry Burke, Hung Duong, Innas Tsuroiya, Mara Coson, Martin Germann
ROH
Jalan Surabaya 66
Jakarta 10310
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳
Aditya Novali, Albertho Wanma, Bea Camacho, Budi Santoso, Charwei Tsai, chi too, Kate Newby, Kazuko Miyamoto, Kitty Taniguchi, Mella Jaarsma, Mira Rizki Kurnia, Oototol, Orawan Arunrak, Rab, Raha Raissnia, Tcheu Siong, Tith Kanitha
Accompanied with texts by:
Denise Lai, Erwin Romulo, Harry Burke, Hung Duong, Innas Tsuroiya, Mara Coson, Martin Germann
The exhibition will be open to the public from 30 January through 13 April 2025
ROH
Jalan Surabaya 66
Jakarta 10310
ROH is delighted to invite you to 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳, a twelve-week long exhibition with the quiet provocation: how might we navigate a world without an axis? How do we make space for complexity and for contradiction?
Across twelve weeks, artworks and texts enter at syncopated stages, in cases transforming or exiting entirely. At its core, the exhibition resists the familiar impulse to reduce, to simplify, to render the observable as well as the unobservable into manageable terms. It is inspired by artists whose works belong to a world of surfaces, objects, and production too often ignored, making revolutions that are gentle and profound in and from multiple places.
To refuse centralization is to acknowledge the restless, layered complexity of the present—a moment in which the drive to control, to impose order, has often come at the expense of what is vital, unpredictable, and alive.
