Installation (Installation)

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.

Photography (Photography)

Mooi indie (which translates to “Beautiful Indies”) is a term used to depict the beauty of nature in the East Indies during the period of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. The term is usually used to describe a painting, romanticising the alluring tropics through the lens of European imperialism. Later in the 1950s, the prominent Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono, who is known as one of the founding fathers of Indonesian Modern Art, publicly rejected the Mooi Indie genre as Indonesian art.

Photography (Photography)

Composed of four images, the series Sleeping Elephant in the Axis of Yogyakarta (2011) explores the artist’s observation of how Javanese mythology and cosmology have marked the geography of Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Indonesia. Through photomontage digital operation, an identical elephant is superimposed in front of iconic landmark of the city: Parangtritis Beach, Sultan Square, the City Monument and Mount Merapi. These four locations are spiritual symbols and the subject of cosmological beliefs in Indonesia and the imagery of elephant has long been considered as a cultural and religious icon.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Lara uses things readily at hand to create objects and situations that interrogate the processes of art and the spectrum of roles that art and artists play in society. To these ends, she has used furniture, projections, photographs, clothing, and even people as her materials. A reflection on how the production of meaning itself takes place in the manufacturing of things is embodied in wooden hand chairs, a crafty Indonesian version of the iconic Pedro Friedeberg 1960s Pop design.

Photography (Photography)

In the Family Portrait series, Akiq AW documents reliefs and statues in Jogja, Indonesia that present an image of the ideological nuclear family. Following Indonesia’s communal and political conflicts, and its economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the second Indonesian President Suharto established the “New Order” regime. During this period, there were efforts to control the national birth rate through a programme called Keluarga Berencana (Family Planning).

Photography (Photography)

This year: missing witness by Brook Andrew consists of a multi-layered collage of photographs. The work features newspaper cut-outs of the phrases: “This year: be prepared…” and “missing witness” overlaid onto a disaster scene, upon a worn-up manuscript. Pulled from The New York Times , the image is of a destroyed temple on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, that has increasingly experienced natural disasters due to climate change.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leyla Stevens’s two-channel video Patiwangi, the death of fragrance is an immersive video installation that addresses erased histories. In the left channel, set in a fine museum storage facility, art conservators unfurl and inspect modernist Balinese paintings, prints, and sculptures. In the right channel, Javanese-Australian dancers, Ade Suharto and Melanie Lane, echo each other’s movements.

Installation (Installation)

Recollections of Long Lost Memories by Ahmad Fuad Osman is a series of 71 black and white sepia-toned archival photographs that chart, with nostalgia, the social encounters between hierarchies of life in the Malay world. It begins with British colonial rule in the mid 1800s, followed by its occupation by Japanese forces in the 1940s, the rise of Communism in the 1950s, and then the racial issues between Islamic, Chinese, and Indonesian populations in a multicultural country desiring political independence in the 1960 and 70s. The archival photographs in this series were gleaned from national archives, museums, libraries, and old books across Malaysia.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Fourth Notebook features a solo choreography by dancer Benjamin Ord. In an empty dance studio, Ord begins seated on his knees on the floor. He moves subtly with gentle strokes to the rhythm of a woman’s voice speaking short phrases in French.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Inspired by the 1934 novella Duo by the French writer Colette, Sriwhana Spong’s film Beach Study explores ideas of disappearance and the ephemeral, both physically and psychologically. In the film, a female body conducts abstract dance movements on a beach, responding to the environment that surrounds her. This particular beach was one the artist loved as a child, but today it is hardly accessible because it is in the hands of a private landowner.

Installation (Installation)

Third Realm (2011) grew out of the artist’s long-term research of Indonesia’s colonial history and the processes of modernization and urbanization that have taken place there. Kuswidananto describes the nation as perpetually in an “in-between” state of transition. Thus he has developed the concept of a third reality, third space, or third body—an identity specifically for Indonesia that reflects its spatial realities and national character.