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.