Lyra Oey transdisciplinary artist, artist-runner and curator     ...    Please reachout for inquiries, collaboration possibilities, studio visit or something else...
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Hello, welcome, spectator, to my research page, The Colour of Nostalgia. Here, the traces of my research take on a kaleidoscop-esque view of my search into my family heritage. The ongoing silence surrounding Indonesian history is also present within my family. While both sides of my family have a connection to Indonesia, stories were not shared, pictures and photo albums remained behind closed cupboards, and recipes became stale after the loss of many of my family members. My grandparents on my mother's side were part of this colonial occupation and returned to the Netherlands when my mother was 4 years old. My grandfather on my father's side was born in Indonesia and later migrated to the Netherlands in 1946, where he married and started a family.

This raised the question for me: how do I relate to these family histories when the embodied experiences have been lost?

When a bootlegger grapples with identity, someone needs to peel back the layers. So I set out on a quest, and along the way I encountered different narrators of a past I had been shielded from, but that nevertheless fuelled a personal desire to belong—but to what, and to whom? And why the silence?
This project frames a rediscovery of a personal inheritance through forms of ego-literature, in which the blind spots are explored through a combination of fictional storylines, family photo albums, public archives, and documentation from my 2025 journey to Indonesia. These materials, together with screenshots and personal reflections, create a space in which different contexts, continents, and the polarising divides within my own identity can go-together.

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