Fendry Ekel makes music tangible through installations
Fendry Ekel makes music tangible through installations
Paul F. Agusta, Contributor, Jakarta, pfa0109@yahoo.com
Did you ever wish that music were something you could touch,
something that you could walk into, something that you could
sense in a tactile way, not just hear?
Fendry Ekel offers just such an experience in his exhibition
called FEAR (Finding Everything and Realizing) currently on at
Galeri Lontar, Jl. Utan Kayu No.68H.
From ceiling to floor the music flows in notes on a
multicolored canvas -- thus frozen in space and time -- as the
strains of the original composition, "Song of Life", originating
from a video being projected onto a wall across the room, float
past on the airwaves.
"Visual art and music are a meeting place. And I want to meet
people with my art," Fendry explains. "Video serves as an alibi
for meeting new people, and art allows you to enter new
realities, inviting people in. And they, in turn, invite you in."
"The Song of Life", Fendry explained, is inspired by a poem by
Mother Theresa that he carries with him wherever he travels,
offering it to musicians for further creative elaboration, which
he then records on video. This exhibition features two of these
musical creations, one by a street rapper he met in Paris, and
the other by a band of Yogyakarta street musicians who call
themselves Suara Minoritas (Minority Voice).
A third version was also presented by French-Canadian
vocalist-guitarist Laura Riviere at the opening on Monday, Dec.
20, of this show, which will be on through Jan. 14, with a
holiday interlude from Dec. 24 through Jan. 2.
"Every piece is autonomous, but they are connected to each
other. My work is about exploration of identity and each person's
place in the world and how they relate to each other," said the
intense young man in the tee-shirt and trucker's hat.
Fendry, who was born in Indonesia and lives in Holland but
calls himself a "citizen of the world", feels that objects can
convey identities. This is what he explores in his installation
pieces.
"The most important thing is that the link between the
objects, the structure and the selection makes the identity," he
explained. I am more interested in that connection than I am in
the objects themselves."
In a relatively open space to the left of the entry to the
gallery up a flight of stairs, Fendry has projected a video of
Suara Minoritas band performing "Song of Life" on a bridge over a
Central Java river.
Beneath that projection is a large braided carpet woven of
strips of newspaper -- the stories of people and the substance of
individual existence intertwined in a familiar form that is also
somehow exotic and elusive.
This graduate of the Rietveld Academi in the Netherlands
reaches beyond appearances to present his proposal of the truth
about being an individual.
He initiates his pieces for personal reasons and delves deeper
and deeper into himself and his motivations until he discovers
the universal human element in what has driven him into a
particular creative exploration.
What Fendry has done in this exhibition is to collect and
present an eclectic conglomeration of personal interpretations of
life from varied sources while managing to subtly stimulate human
perception.
His intention seems not to be to tell people what to think,
but rather to nudge individual minds into action through a
challenging blend of sound, color, form and the written word.
FEAR (Finding Everything And Realizing)
Galeri Lontar
Jl. Utan Kayu No.68H
Central Jakarta
exhibition runs through Jan. 14, 2005,
with a break from Dec. 24 through Jan. 2