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