Tracking down culture through textiles

Tracking down culture through textiles

Tarko Sudiarno, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A piece of cloth is not a mere weaving of fibers but it can track
down cultural traces of a nation. In times past, cloth was a
symbol of a cultural exchange involving nations.

With Tracking Cloth as its theme, Australian artists use
textiles as a medium to express a particular culture in an
exhibition titled Contemporary Australian Cloth Exhibition. The
exhibition was held from Aug. 19 to Aug. 26 at Bentara Budaya in
Yogyakarta and is set to open at the Hotel Borobudur in Jakarta.

The exhibition features contemporary Australian textiles and
fiber works, with the curator from Wollongong City Gallery and
the Sue Blanchfield School of Creative Art, Wollongong
University. Participants include Keiko Amenomori-Schmeisser,
Patricia Black, Jennifer Dudley, Karen Edin, Ernabella Arts Inc.,
Dhangal Gurruwiwi, Ruth Hadlow, Nelia Justo, Virginia Kaiser,
Djapirri Mununggurreriti, Marrnyula Munugurr, Debra Porch, Nalda
Searles, Holly Story, Belinda Waide and Liz Williamson.

The displayed textile creations are contemporary works, and
its patterns, motifs and production techniques reveal their
origins and influences, like Javanese or Timorese motifs.

Tracking Cloth expresses the artists' experiences during their
trips to trace other cultures, particularly Asian. Using textiles
as the medium, these artists show their empathy for outside
cultures influencing them. They admit and show respect for
regional differences and indicate them in a global context.

Through the displayed works, it seems like these Australian
artists want to open inter-community dialogs, where people share,
understand each other and develop their beliefs obtained from
textile traditions in China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Malaysia
and Thailand.

The revelation of these experiences provides an understanding
of textile commercial history and recognizes textile motifs in a
particular culture either for daily or spiritual purposes.

James Bennet, a curator of Southeast Asia cultural and art
works at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory,
Darwin, Australia, said the works shown in the exhibition were
evidence that individual Australian artists had the courage to
leave their own cultural boundaries and translate their
experiences into new cultural forms.

These textile works, he said, could specifically be used to
judge the dynamism of cultural exchanges between Australia and
Indonesia. Bilateral relationships between two countries are
indeed dynamic. As historian Campbell Macknight put it, Australia
and Indonesia may be neighboring countries but, this relationship
may be likened to two neighbors living next to the other and
sharing backyards, a boundary which makes them hard to understand
each other.

Relations between the two countries, said James Bennet, have
ebbed and flowed, with the relationship deteriorating most during
the East Timor conflict in 1999. At that time in Brisbane, the
Australian art community was preparing a great celebration of
cultural exchanges in the form of Asia Pacific Third Trinale
event sponsored by the Queensland Art Gallery. Suddenly the East
Timor crisis climaxed and the committee received hundreds of
petitions to boycott the art event because of the presence of
Indonesian artists.

He said that many Australian artists had, for many years, been
consistently building a sincere relationship with Indonesia. The
emergence of the anti-Indonesian sentiment among some people in
Australia's art community that year was very much fed by
unbalanced media reports on Indonesia, he claimed. This
unbalanced reporting on East Timor may have been even worse than
the reporting during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, he further
claimed.

Explorations and cultural exchanges are concrete actions to
respect each other. The courage of individual artists to explore
beyond their cultural boundaries and translate their explorations
into fresh forms can serve as a good means to negotiate the
friendship between the two countries.

Unfortunately, the exhibition, which will also be brought to
Singapore and Australia in 2003, does not include Indonesian
works, making it hard to make a comparison. It will be beautiful
if those pieces can be placed next to each other.