Students exhibit impressive Islamic art

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): Although contemporary art is global by name, much of it is highly influenced by the West. For decades, artists around the world have struggled to depict their trials and tribulations by using techniques that come more naturally to them than those from the West.

This spirit is very obvious in most of the 150 exhibits on display at Taman Mini's Museum Istiqlal. Muslim students from Yogyakarta are holding an impressive exhibition of fine arts that reflect the growing preoccupation of people here with the country's majority religion.

Apart from examining Islamic values, the exhibition is meant to remind the world that Yogyakarta remains the cultural center of the country. The proceeds from the exhibition will go to complete the construction of the Al Muhtar mosque on the campus of the Fine Arts and Design School of the city's Indonesia Institute of Arts (ISI).

The students are also staging a piece of theater that has sets and props as prescribed for Western dramatic performances but in spirit is Islamic. After much sound and fury created by percussionists the inner conflict is resolved only with total submission to God and a final realization of the creator's ultimate unity and oneness.

A leisurely walk around the exhibits reveals the helplessness of Muslim artists still looking for something that can be called purely Islamic. On canvas after canvas, artists are inspired to integrate ancient Islamic principles not only with modern techniques of painting but also with ideas from all over the world, including local cultures that existed long before Islam arrived.

It is perhaps essential to remember that in the beginning there was nothing Muslim about man. Complicated political and social events combined to transform a number of lands with a variety of earlier histories into Muslim lands.

The problem of the modern Muslim remains what he should do with all that existed before Islam, which is older than, and quite independent, of the faith itself?

The peculiarity of Islamic art is that it continues to consist of a large number of quite disparate traditions, and inherited arts of extraordinary technical virtuosity and style. It is no exaggeration to say that the simple, practical and almost puritanical milieu of early Islam took over an extremely sophisticated system of visual forms and pre-Islamic traditions. Anything even resembling aesthetic or visually delightful forms seem to be almost absent from lands where Islam was born.

The origins of Islamic art can therefore be traced back to the confluence of two entirely separate things: earlier artistic traditions and a new faith. To study Islamic art is to unearth not a static, sudden style, but one which was slowly built up of a visual language of forms with many dialects and many changes. It may not be an exaggeration to say that to be able to one day recognize a common structure remains a real challenge to this day in the study of Islamic art.

Experts say it was in the 1970s when Islamic elements like calligraphy were introduced into contemporary painting and artists opted for abstraction rather than realistic depictions of the world. This tendency was to heat up during the two decades that followed and remains uppermost in a great number of minds still struggling to give a truthful expression of themselves.

Rommi uses oil paints and acrylic and the values that inspire him most are definitely Islamic. "I will never depict a nude figure and continue to emphasize the importance of the spiritual world over the material," Rommi told The Jakarta Post.

It is not just nudity that is negated by the pious here but also the representation in art of all living things. The justification for the prohibition being that doing so is like trying to compete with God, who alone can create something living. It has had the effect of moving the center of Islamic artistic concentration to calligraphy, where the word as the medium of divine revelation plays a tremendous role. Islamic art is also recognizable today for its continuous reference to Koranic sources.

But the majority of Muslim painters cannot help but be inspired by the cultural heritage of their own surroundings as well and show a deep interest in indigenous, ancient models full of their own folklore and folk art. This is a truly global phenomenon. It is happening in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and there is no reason why it should not be happening in Java as well.

The exhibition remains open till Sept. 30.