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.