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.