Its Always Fun to Live in This Country
2009 - Installation (Installation)
Eko Nugroho
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows. Nugroho’s work both preserves traditional culture and offers a contemporary interpretation of it through his insertion of comical figures to comment on current social conditions. Moving Landscape includes characters such as a diamond-headed man, a UFO, and other items that appear frequently in Nugroho’s drawings and murals. The shadows and silhouettes rotate in a custom-made, lit tent structure to create a fantasy world that blurs the line between daily life and fiction. The narratives here are complex and ambiguous and speak to a range of psychological states that echo everyday reality.
Working with a variety of media including comics, animation, mural painting, graffiti, embroidery, video, and puppetry, Yogyakarta-based artist Eko Nugroho comments on social justice, cultural tradition, and the human condition. The concepts, materials, and strategies of his oeuvre reflect a sophisticated understanding of “fine art,” crafts, as well as street art. For example, Nugroho’s use of embroidery is inspired by local street gangs whose jackets are embroidered with their logos and by the embroidered badges worn by local government officials to announce their affiliations. After the Indonesian Reformation in 1998, Nugroho started to use caricature in his work to criticize the government’s policies about democracy, freedom, and censorship. These metamorphic figures, their surroundings, and the idioms indicate the dysfunction of contemporary Indonesian society as well as the tribulations of the world at large.
Colors:
Other related works, blended automatically
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Petra Cortright
2012In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape...
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Petra Cortright
2011In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
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Shilpa Gupta
2014These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
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Kota Ezawa
2014Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
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Paul McCarthy
2010To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
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Koki Tanaka
2013This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
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Chen Shaoxiong
2006After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
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Raymond Pettibon
2005The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
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Qiu Anxiong
2011A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
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Shilpa Gupta
2009In Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...
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Edgar Arceneaux
2006Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
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Kota Ezawa
2017The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
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Julio Cesar Morales
2008The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California...
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Raymond Pettibon
2000The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
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Shilpa Gupta
2008The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...
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Kota Ezawa
2002The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...