Slow Ceremony developed through Sherry Quiambao’s time in Makassar, South Sulawesi, extending her interest in still life through moving image, photography, sound and sculptural arrangements. The exhibition reworks encounters, images and details that remained with her after leaving. Familiar objects are stacked, balanced and repurposed, while everyday actions—washing, carrying, holding and tending—are slowed and rearranged, shifting between practical necessity and ceremony. Through repetition, ordinary gestures become acts of continuity and adaptation.

Brightly coloured plastics recur throughout the work. Baskets, vessels, scourers and jelly moulds are cheap, useful and embedded in everyday life, while discarded plastic is highly visible along Makassar’s shoreline. Their colour and abundance are seductive, but their persistence is troubling. The works hold these opposing qualities together: utility and excess, attraction and unease.

The exhibition’s constructed imagery reflects Quiambao’s experience of encountering Makassar as a visitor—partial and selective, filtered through memory, idealisation and desire. Developed through collaborations with performers, musicians and creative practitioners across Makassar, Naarm and Boorloo, Slow Ceremony asks what happens when familiar materials and gestures are displaced, repeated and made strange.