Images of Kalimantan: A travel document
By Peter Kerr
JAKARTA (JP): A craggy pillar of rock spears skywards out of the vast Central Kalimantan jungle. Elsewhere a cloud shaped like an angry jinn makes its way across the evening sky.
In the land below the treetops, a Dayak woman and her children stand at the doorway of their wooden home. A woman breast-feeding her young child outside smiles toward the camera, and inside another house a dukun (shaman) seems suspended in mid-air, surrounded by enthralled onlookers.
These are some of the images photographed over 20 years by Mansur Geiger, an Australian-born geologist with an unmistakable love of the Dayak people and Kalimantan's natural beauty.
Geiger, now living in Jakarta with his wife Utami and their three daughters, came to Indonesia in 1972 at the age of 20.
In 1981 he began exploring for minerals in a remote part of Central Kalimantan, at the headwaters of the Kahayan River in the Schwaner-Muller ranges.
Fifty-five of the hundreds of photographs he has taken since then are on display at the Textile Museum in Central Jakarta, under the JakArt umbrella.
Geiger himself was unable to attend the exhibition opening on Wednesday, being on another trip to Kalimantan.
His photographs document travels in long, narrow canoes up the rivers and rapids that allow access to Central Kalimantan, but where "life's hardships become one's joys", as one image is captioned.
Geiger's work shows the variety of flora and fauna in one of the world's areas of greatest ecological diversity, from a huge iridescent beetle, to a giant python that has just swallowed a pig, to the rich red heart of a rare rafflesia plant.
But central to the exhibition are his images of the Dayak people, at ease in their forest home.
Proceeds from the sale of the photographs, for US$150 each, go to Yayasan Tambuhak Sinta, a foundation for developing the upper Kahayan community.
At the same venue are two other small exhibitions, by visual artist Daniel Dick and Irish oil painter Donna Coogan.
Dick received his arts education in San Francisco but spent his teenage years in Jakarta and now lives in Denpasar, Bali.
He works mostly with silkscreen, linocut and collagraph. The latter involves building a relief plate out of cardboard and glue onto a cardboard background, which is then printed on paper to create a reverse image.
Dick's highly symbolic works are impressions of places he has lived and traveled, including the United States, Morocco, Hawaii and Spain.
Coogan's works are in thickly painted blues, reds and black -- blurs of color glimpsed through a deep sea.
Images of Kalimantan by Mansur Geiger is showing at the Textile Museum, Jl K.S. Tubun, Central Jakarta, until June 30.