Exhibition captures the human in the machine
Exhibition captures the human in the machine
Chisato Hara, The Jakarta Post, Tangerang
A wide, almost pristine, unnamed road traverses the quaint
residential area of Bintaro and passes into the still-developing
industrial center of Bumi Serpong Damai, Tangerang, where the
houses and small shops that line the road begin to dwindle into
fields of cultivated green lawn.
Approaching Jl. Kapten Soebiando Djojohadikusumo feels like
falling off the Jabotabek map -- and indeed, the area beyond is a
patchwork of dotted lines for planned toll roads, hypermarkets
and other facilities for a growing capital.
Just before the edge of this horizon stands a cool structure
of steel and glass housing the Swiss German University and the
German Centre, a brilliance of precise engineering in the
unforgiving afternoon sun.
An automatic revolving door ushers visitors into the lobby,
laid out in black marble tiles and aluminum columns supporting a
lofty ceiling of the same buffed medium. The only splash of color
is the fresh green of bamboo swaying just outside the floor-to-
ceiling windows.
From Feb. 28 to mid-April, this lobby is the site of a small
photographic exhibition, Aesthetika Industrialis: In Pursuit of
Beauty, by Austrian-born photographer and multimedia expert
Dominik, or D! as he prefers to sign off.
Dominik also runs his own production company, bd-zok, offering
one-stop digital communication solutions for industrial clients,
including leading players in the oil and gas, mining, textile and
communication infrastructure sectors.
Always a keen amateur photographer, Dominik's foray into the
professional arena was triggered by the advent of digital cameras
and photo editing computer applications, which allowed him to
translate his background in information technology, video
production and digital design into the photographic medium.
Specializing initially in product and industrial photography
built upon bd-zok's client base, he has also ventured into the
hospitality sector in Bali, contributing food, interior and
cultural shots to respected magazines such as Wine & Dine.
It is his digitized eye for detail and color that provides the
canvas of his images, and the architecture and interior of the
German Centre provides a complementary frame and counterpoint to
D!'s industrial photography. Featuring close-up and landscape
shots of textile factories, coal mines, polystyrene factories and
communication towers, the images juxtapose inorganic line and
structure with the inherent, yet implied, organic texture of man-
made materials and color.
Taken while on assignment for clients in Indonesia and
Malaysia, the photos in the exhibit differ from typical
industrial photographs that are commissioned for use in marketing
and promotional paraphernalia with a view to conveying a
corporate message.
"I wanted to show that esthetically appealing motives are
readily found in factories and other places of industrial
activity .... To reveal a hidden beauty that is pleasing to the
eye," he said.
While the common perception of mechanical engineering may run
the spectrum from cold and inhuman to hard and unbending, D!'s
digital images capture the human hand behind their inanimate,
functional subjects. Accented with a splash of industrial green,
yellow, turquoise and even white, each piece is a counterbalance
to the static and the mutable.
One image, for example, shows both the resilience and
malleability of steel in a deceptively cool hue cast upon the
steel heat-treatment process, while another portrays the speed
and torque of a spinning machine against the fragility of
millimeter-thick threads. Still another captures a stalwart
conveyor bridge and tower of a coal mine, silhouetted within a
sea of fiery dawn.
Others are compositions of geometric perspective, exploring
complex matrices of beams, grilles, levers, pipes and spiraling
metalloid stairs in a vertigo of scale and distance.
As D! said, the photographs "are not meant to tell a story or
to influence the viewers' perception, but rather to introduce
them to some less exposed aspects of human industrial
activities".
Even so, Aesthetika Industrialis, surprisingly, leaves the
viewer with an overall impression of calm -- although it is easy
to imagine the whirrs, clanks and hisses of mechanical timbre on
the factory floor. A calm, perhaps, derived from a vision of the
order and beauty of precision as created by imperfect man.
Aesthetika Industrialis: In Pursuit of Beauty, a contemporary
industrial photographic exhibition, will run from Feb. 28 to mid-
April at the German Centre Indonesia, Jl. Kapten Soebiando
Djojohadikusumo, Bumi Serpong Damai, Tangerang 15321. A detailed
map to the center is available online at:
www.germancentre.co.id/images/cu_mapbsd.jpg. Dominik's portfolio
can also be viewed at www.d-imijis.com, and their multimedia
application at www.bd-zok.com.