Dark Lupa

02 May – 08 June 2026

A duo exhibition by Jalaini Abu Hassan and Ramlan Abdullah

Dark Lupa explores the active dimension of choice, the decisions that lead the artist to bring certain inheritances, knowledge or experiences into the light while consciously setting others in the shadows, in order to free their creative self.

Through the paintings and sculptures of two key artists from the Malaysian contemporary art scene, of two friends finally reunited in a joint exhibition, Dark Lupa invites viewers in the heart of the creative process.

Excerpts and articles

Dark Lupa

Dark Lupa explores the shadow of the unspoken at the heart of every artist. The darker side that accompanies each gesture, each work, growing out of the sedimentation of choices. These repeated frictions with reality that shape a vision or a style leave behind a residue that swells in the darkness. A hidden intimacy, whose ambivalence lies between memory and decision, in the acute awareness of the work as a passage between different states, an extension, a rupture, or a reinvention.

Heir to a tradition, to a culture, the artist chooses to exhibit and expose himself, placing at the center of his art a responsibility as a transmitter, where only forgetting frees the space for a truly personal voice. A tree dies from exposing too much of its roots. From shadow to light emerge the contours of a human construction, a will, an aesthetics of choice.

Dark Lupa navigates the active force, the driving phenomenon that animates the work from its creation to its exhibition. It is a descent into the deep reason of the act as both means and necessity, as an existential marker. It is also the story of two friends, an invitation to glimpse, through their respective mediums and temperaments, subtle perspectives on one another, the echo of mutual forms. Ramlan Abdullah and Jalaini Abu Hassan share the same awareness of Art as a means of transmission. In their quest for identity, they distribute shadows, carrying their existential anthology toward the light.

The exhibition inaugurates a new building for Tali, which already holds a long memory embedded in its walls, visible in the succession of its extensions, or the shape of its roof structures. More than a hundred years of presence at the heart of the city, near the river, as an echo of an urban beginning that has since become assertive, written over the years from fishing and market life to Art, which today chooses to remember it. The same water flows as a sign over the very same river stones in Ramlan’s works, the same energy runs through Jalaini’s paintings.

Through the works of two of the most important contemporary Malaysian artists a story unfolds in filigree, both intimate and universal, along the fine thread of forgetting. A layering of signs, like building a raft, eyes turned toward the horizon, back to the waves, beneath darkened stars.

The Dark Nest Inside

Each artist carries within themselves a dark zone, briefly pierced by flashes, a part of unconscious and repression, the limits of what they reveal of themselves to themselves. Its black outlines extend into the margins of their works, discreet signals to those who look. No real active prohibition here, no radical transgression or disappearance. No amnesia that would hurl desire or memory into the abyss. Only a kind of patina, the accumulated opacity of years spent in friction with the world, with people, with society and its customs, small particles shed from certainties and browned radicalities. A fold in the fierce momentum of the self, and within that inflection, the intimidating hollow where so many sparks are enclosed.

In this cavern, akin to Plato’s, the walls are covered with shadows of firm silhouettes whose blackness seems to perspire. Career, critics, recognition, habits, and survival have reinforced their contours, simple, with supple protrusions, accepted and assured. The artist shall have the courage to walk through it with their own torch, to caress surfaces with the deliberate flames of their urge to speak, to swell that fold with warm air and turn it outward into the open. The force of a revelation, a truth—but what truth?

Dark Lupa explores the vulnerabilities of art as a rite of passage from self to world, as the radical density of language understood like an ontological paradigm. […] The ritual outlines the framework of a synthesis drawn from the trance of a process, its own temporality, and the initial prayer from self to gesture, then from an object to the world. […] The transparent, performative, and complete act, that of the instant beyond expectations, does not lie. At most, it releases in a dream the hermetic traces of a not-fully-expressed.

From black to white, and back again, Dark Lupa navigates intimate narratives. In soft darkness gather the fragments of an essential identity, inscribed in its pure radicals on canvas and steel. It is a muted incantation that pierces from artist to viewer in a flash of ultra-dense black. The hollow in motion. The frame becomes an altar, almost a fetish. The object traps a phenomenon of struggle, like a form of shamanic ritual whose ultimate aim is, through the act, to reclaim control over reality and its becoming. The seeping image dries and sediments. It becomes one with the material that entirely contains it. Beyond figurative or abstract, lies the performative role of the sign, the tribal and hermetic language of the ideogram. […]

The void grins with its black mouth. Light comes from the other side. Its charged air clings to us, draws us in, passes through our throat, and chants.

The Star, in: Weekend for the arts 01/05/26

A new gallery opening in the heart of Kuala Lumpur is always welcome news. Dark Lupa marks the reopening of Tali Art Gallery at its new heritage shoplot premises, following its relocation from Petaling Jaya.

French gallery owner and curator Thomas Martin, noted for his distinctive sculptural concepts, returns with a strong curatorial statement featuring two prominent figures in Malaysian art, Ramlan Abdullah and Jalaini Abu Hassan.

The exhibition foregrounds the intimate gestures of sculpture and painting, with Dark Lupa offering a meditation on the decisions that underpin artistic making. Through a selection of new works engaging with the notion of forgetting, it explores the tension between revelation and omission – how artworks carry ideas and heritage into visibility while allowing other narratives to recede into shadow.