Ros Kamolros Featured in Babette’s Feast Group Exhibition at FUTURES, Melbourne, Australia

Babette’s Feast, a group exhibition by Ros Kamolros, Benjamin Bannan, Nathan Beard, Andrew Browne,  Matilda Davis, Sophie Greig, and Drew Connor Holland that gathers contemporary works of art that engage with the sacred beyond its original context – through objects, images, narratives and simulacra.

 

Spanning multiple mediums – from painting, works on paper, glass sculpture, photography – the exhibition traces how sacred imagery and symbolic forms continue to circulate through contemporary artistic practice. Rather than presenting the sacred as stable or intact, these works attend to the ways artists carry such forms into new contexts, engaging their sources and references through a myriad of approaches. 

Across the exhibition, spirits, saints, religious motifs, and idols emerge not as fixed categories, but as shifting forms of presence.

 

Ros Kamolros’s photograph of a shrine to the ghost Nang Nak is constructed through reflections in the shrine's mirrors, capturing transient encounters between the visible and invisible realms.

 

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Whisp Wisp (2025) explores the relationship between belief, ritual, and desire through the practice of wish-making associated with Nang Nak at Wat Mahabut. Referencing the Buddhist cosmology of the Six Heavens, the work considers Nang Nak’s position within the Catumaharajika Heaven, a realm believed to be higher than that of ghosts, suggesting her transformation into a powerful and protective presence capable of responding to human wishes.

 

The image is constructed through reflections of light and mirrors found within the shrine. While it appears as a collage of a necklace, portraits of Nang Nak, and fragments of her bedroom, the photograph was made in a single exposure. The work seeks to capture transient encounters between visible and invisible realms, where light momentarily connects spaces that seem to exist across different dimensions.

 

Text courtesy of the artist and Futures Gallery.