Paintings explore dreams of Indonesian women artists
Paintings explore dreams of Indonesian women artists
By Sarah Murray
JAKARTA (JP): What are the dreams of Indonesian women?
Australian artist Janis Somerville carried this question with her
to her four-month residency in the Fine Arts Department of the
Bandung Institute of Technology. She then asked this question of
six Indonesian artists and asked them to create works with her on
this theme.
The result: Pembawa Impian (Dream Carriers), closed recently
at the Soemardja Gallery in Bandung, and opened in Jakarta
yesterday at the Ruang Pameran Utama, Taman Ismail Marzuki for a
week-long stay. After closing in Jakarta, the show will continue
on to five cities in Australia.
According to artist and curator F.X. Harsono, Pembawa Impian
is the first women's exhibition organized around a theme to ever
take place in Indonesia.
The Indonesian artists span a wide range of ages, ethnic
backgrounds and artistic interests. There are two painters,
Farida Srihadi, the show's senior artist, and Nenny Nurbayani,
sculptor Dolorosa Sinaga, sculptor and ceramicist Innes
Indreswari S., performance artist Marintan Sirait, and Kumara
Lily, the youngest, a student at the Bandung Institute of
Technology, who, as yet, defies categorization.
Wide variety
Janis Somerville favors mixed media works in three dimensions
and installations. As might be expected with such a range of
artists, the show presents a wide variety of work. Some of the
artists took this opportunity to explore and create new kinds of
work.
Lily created a work from a series of wooden panels alternately
covered with black and white checked cloth, and painted yellow
and black incised in places to create a pattern of plain wood-
colored lines. At each end is fastened a mirror painted with
black lines on one end, yellow lines on the other, that define
the space of reflection. The work is hung at a height that allows
viewers to stand in the middle and see themselves, and their
reflections, reflected.
According to the artist, the mirrors represent a process that
repeats: a person has dreams and desires that she strives to
achieve; once she has achieved them, the process begins again,
with new dreams. The exploratory nature of the work is
highlighted by the fact that Lily was dissatisfied with the work
as it appeared in Bandung and changed it, painting the non-
checkered panels fully and attaching some round, etched copper
plates.
Sculptor Dolorosa Sinaga explores two-dimensional painting,
although still space is the most expressive element in each of
the three pieces that make up her untitled triptych. All three
are framed by deep wooden frames.
The first painting has an outer border of deep purple, an
inner one of white, with a center of purples, blues and blacks.
This serves as a backdrop for two small headless bronze figures
that stand in the left bottom corner, hands covering their
genitals in proper Javanese submissive posture. They are fenced
in by copper wire, torn at the top and on one side, that doesn't
totally surround them but obscures their vision.
The second piece is all painting: a human figure hangs in the
center of the painting in what could be a doorway, head tilted
downward in a posture that could be one of defeat and
hopelessness or one of restful sleeping, waiting to rise again.
The rectangle of white that borders the figure is made
mysterious by the two other rectangles, one a bold outline of
black that stands in the middle of the paper, the other a
rectangle that falls from the white rectangle containing the
figure, as if light were falling from a doorway, or perhaps a
piece of a wall has been cut away and lies, fallen, on the
floor.
Is the figure standing in a doorway, or in fact pinned to a
wall? We can't tell.
The third piece contains a small painted figure at the top
encaged by black mesh. Below lies a piece of paper, again painted
with dark colors, that is half-rolled up and fastened to the top
third of the paper, creating a hidden space that cannot be seen
by the viewer. The dreams of all her figures are thus bounded and
limited: by borders, frames, fences, hidden spaces.
But this isn't a comment about the status of women
particularly; her figures are androgynous and the situation she
illustrates is one general to contemporary Indonesian life.
Painter Farida Srihadi, after many years of living in the
shadow of her famous artist husband, is now coming into her own
and receiving recognition as one of the best abstract painters in
Indonesia. She is the only artist who used the cylinder given to
her by Janis; she uses it to suspend from the ceiling two long
pieces of sheer white gauzy cloth with the texture of dreams on
which she has painted a symbolic progression.
The first piece starts at the top with a dark blue night sky
peppered with gold stars and descends into reds, golds, and
blacks that surround various symbols that include an arrow
pointing down.
The second piece starts with a red circle of sun at the top
that shines onto a big clear space of white, then descends into
bold brush strokes of black that cascade around two rectangles
that contain the symbols for male and female, symmetrical and
balanced on the cloth.
The choice of the cloth is brilliant, but the painting itself
seems more thought than felt, although as always, Farida knows
how to create visual drama through color and composition. She
says the symbols of the piece express her private feelings about
issues of relations between men and women. She also has changed
the piece for the Jakarta exhibition, adding a third piece of
cloth.
Marintan created a beautiful and simple work entitled
Pembangunan Rumah (Building A House), made of two different
colors of rich, brown earth carefully arranged in an arc that
follow the curve of the gallery's inner wall. The work represents
the dream of having a house and land to call one's own. The area
defined by the work is then used as the setting for her
performance piece.
A series of oil lamps are placed around the outer perimeter as
Marintan enters, in a simple costume of black. Slowly, slowly she
moves, crouching over like an animal, and covers her entire head
with a sheet of newspaper. She molds the paper to her features,
crumpling and pressing it into shape, and slowly slides it off,
crumpling it to leave it behind, as if it were a mask that were
incomplete or, already used, ready to be peeled off so the
process can start again.
Sculptor Innes Indreswari S. has also created a mixed media
work, creating a large circle of earth on the floor bordered by
two rows of rocks with a large red circle in the center. This
piece looks up at similar painting on the wall. Painter Nenny
Nurbayani has expressed her striving for dreams and self-
expression in painting entitled My Conversations with the Moon.
The strongest
One of the strongest and most fascinating works in the show is
by Janis, and as yet untitled.
A large circle is traced in feathers. In the center lies an
arrangement of objects as offerings: some beautiful and unusual
Indonesian cloth, a single red rose, a small carved Garuda bird.
The overall effect is magical and eerie; a sense of power
emanates from the piece whose source cannot be found in any one
of the visual elements. Also included in the show in Bandung were
pieces created during her residency at ITB.
A strong piece is a work entitled Wanita-Wanita (Women). A
trapezoidal bamboo frame is draped on three sides with batik
cloth, forming a kind of peep-show tent. A peep-show tent is
found in western-style carnivals; holes are cut into a tent, and
men pay for the privilege of looking through the hole at a sexy,
dancing woman.
A light, at the back, shines through the cloth. Viewers who
enter can lift cut pieces of cloth to reveal images of women and
key words clipped from Indonesian newspapers and magazines. The
images of women from the magazines are of young, beautiful women
who meet the media's unrealistic standards of beauty, while the
batik represents the long tradition of female creativity and
beauty in Indonesian societies.
A third work by Janis, Winds of Change, consists of small
squares of batik cloth which have ancient symbols of humanity
painted on them, hanging on a clothesline as if out to dry, blown
from behind by a series of fans.
Feminist perspective
Such works show the kind of feminist perspective Janis brings
to her work that is rarely found in works by Indonesian artists,
including those in this show.
This lack became the center of a vigorous and lengthy
discussion on opening night between an audience of about 40
people and a panel of five of the seven artists included in the
show.
Many were puzzled about why this exhibition was organized.
Many also expressed disappointment that the exhibition didn't
show more visual coherence: although all of the works tackled the
theme of women's dreams, the works that resulted are very diverse
and don't share any particular artistic approach. Most works also
don't directly address issues of women's identity or status in
Indonesian society.
The Indonesian artists who sat on the panel all strongly
resisted the idea that female artists suffered from prejudice or
lack of acceptance by male artists, and defended their right to
create work that does not reveal a particular identity as a
'woman' artist. Perhaps this is an important message in itself.
The dreams of women, like the dreams of men, are individual as
well as collective, and sharing a gender does not mean one shares
the same vision or experiences of the world.
The exhibition is more about the struggles of negotiating and
creating female identities across cultural and social
differences, than it is about some kind of vacuous universe and
womanhood.
For Janis, a prime motivation for the show was her
understanding that there are much fewer professional female
artists in Indonesia than male artists, and that women have fewer
opportunities to exhibit their work.
She also wanted the experience of working with Indonesian
women. From her perspective, the show has therefore been a
success, for it has given an opportunity for a diverse group of
female artists to create and exhibit.
In general, this show is one of questions, experiments and
beginnings, rather than polished, finished pieces and clear
answers. It's a show to dream over and absorb, not to analyze.