Mella jaarsma biography of barack
TheJakartaPost
he name Mella Jaarsma in Indonesia usually conjures up the image of a tall blond Dutch artist, of burqas as metaphors, and of Cemeti, the gallery in Yogyakarta she so successfully led with her handsome Javanese husband Nindityo Adipurnomo to become a major venue for change in Indonesia since 1988.
But her retrospective "The Fitting Room", opening on Oct. 27 at the National Gallery in Jakarta, will focus on her artistic creations, which have made a mark in Indonesia and abroad during her 25 years living in Yogyakarta. Surely her most recent creation Square Body refers back to the fascination with shadows she developed when she first arrived in Indonesia in 1984.
Courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Square Body, which was first performed live at the opening of the exhibition "Beyond the Dutch" in Utrecht on Oct. 15, is a fascinating play of light and shadow representing the border between the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the intangible. A male and two females wear dresses on which and in between which move shadows of the four kanda, creatures or elements that in Balinese belief accompany a person as shadows of protection throughout life.
Bali had earlier inspired her work in Pralina Fire Altar (1993), a sculpture containing a cremation oven that she constructed in the village of Munduk in northern Bali.
The idea emerged from the tradition of the inhabitants of the village, who cremated their dead on a bed of banana tree trunks, then gathered the ashes and shaped them into the form of a baby, which they then laid on a cloth.
Living in Indonesia for more than 20 decades, Mella Jaarsma's feelings are those of an Indonesian artist who recognizes the artist's place, role and significance in society.
In the late 1990s, as social, political, ethnic and religious tensions heightened in Indonesia and culminated in exceptional racial violence, the haunting meaning of identity became an even more pressing conside (JP/Bambang Muryanto) Having been living in Indonesia for 30 years, Dutch artist Mella Jaarsma has no intention of turning her back against the place she now calls her home. The artist said she became interested in Indonesia through her fascination with shadows. Published by the Smart Museum, Chicago, 2012 by Stephanie Smith A leading figure within Indonesian art communities, Mella Jaarsma has helped build catalytic cultural institutions: in 1988, she and her husband Nindityo Adipurnomo founded the Cemeti Art House (a key site of creative production, display, and international dialogue within Indonesia) and she also helped launch a related project, the Indonesian Visual Art Archive. Food and meals have figured in many projects at Cemeti and also feature prominently in Jaarsmaâs own work. Notably, she has used meals within projects like ‘Hi Inlander’(1998/1999) and ‘The Feeder’ (2003), both part of a larger series of works in which Jaarsma used contemporary performance art, traditional practices, and current ethnic and political tensions within Indonesian society as points of departure for elaborate costumes made of materials such as goat leather, fish skins, frog legs, and chicken feet. Feast features several of Jaarsmaâs works that use meals to address cooperation and cross-cultural respect. She began to explore these topics in the aftermath of the repressive former president Suhartoâs resignation in 1998âa time of instability that included violent riots against Indonesians of ethnically Chinese heritage. ‘Feast’ includes video documentation of a work that grew directly from these riots: ‘Pribumi Pribumi’ (1998). In this performance, Jaarsma and other Western friends set up simple cooking stations along a Yogyakarta street and served Chinese food to passersby as a means to spark face-to-face dialogue about ethnic conflict. ‘Pribumi Pribumi’ offers a culturally and politically specific counterpoint to the more open-ended ‘I Eat You Eat Me’ (2002/2012) also featured in the exhibition. In this performance, Jaarsma invites participants to partner upâeach selecting food for the other, donning a lightweight span of metal held between le Mella Jaarsma was born in the Netherlands but trained in Indonesia where she has been working as an artist since the early 1980s so she has a certain insider's knowledge and an outsider's perspective. A piece she had in the Asia-Pacific Triennial was titled Hi Inlander (Hello Native). The work is a set of performance capes made from the treated skins of chicken, fish, frogs and kangaroos. It seems Mella is saying something more than posing the question about what it must be like to walk around in someone else's skin. She highlights the uncertainty of identity, one that is not confined or confirmed by location, or by origin. (From the book: Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts, By Graeme Sullivan. The garment symbolises protection, and visually represents fear or a need for a 'security blanket'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mella_Jaarsma Hi Inlander frog leg, chicken feet, kangaroo leather, fish skin, photographs. 3 kitchen tables, spices 1998 / 1999 In the first work using cloaks, Hi Inlander (1998/1999), I connected ideas related to the fragility of modern multi-racial societies with ideas that motivated the racial riots in Indonesia in 1998 and that continue to cause multi-ethnic problems up to the present day. The first veil was made of frog leg skins processed into leather and worn by a man at exhibitions in Bandung and Yogyakarta . I had used frogs before, as in the street performance Pribumi – Pribumi, in which fried frog legs were served to the public to open up a dialogue about what happened to the ethnic Chinese during the riots in Jakarta in May 1998. I used frog legs and frog skins to question the different roles animals play in human culture (holy, food, pest, pet, dirty, etc). Chinese eat frog legs, however Moslems consider this delicacy to be unclean (haram), thus revealing different cultural perceptions. For the exhibition at the Asia Pacific T TheJakartaPost
She saw that shadows had many meanings in different cultures, including in Javanese culture as represented in wayang (shadow puppet) performances.
With the sun shining over the tropical archipelago for almost the whole year, the 54-year-old, who settled in Yogyakarta in 1984, found that her shadows was stronger here than back in her country.
'For me, art should not just beautiful but should be meaningful,' said Jaarsma, who has successfully run the Cemeti Art House Gallery in Yogyakarta with her artist husband Nindityo Adipurnomo since 1988.
In Indonesia, where the influence off art history is not so strong, she felt freer in her creative endeavors as she was not compartmentalized like in Europe.
'Art history in Europe is very set in its ways,' said Jaarsma, whose works are on display at the Nadi Gallery in Jakarta until April 17.
The exhibited pieces are the works she created in the past five years while the exhibition's theme ' 'Potong Waktu' (Cutting the time) ' was taken from an installation that depicted a man holding a pair of huge scissors and dressed in cloth made of small ribbons.
Two different ribbons were used in the installation. One bears philosopher Swami Vivekananda's words: 'The senses cheat you day & night', while the other bears Spanish painter-printmaker Francisco Goya's: 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'.
Potong Waktu was also the title of another piece of art that also utilized scissors to create a vest made of chains.
'I have a special interest in history. I want to describe how people understand the abstract issue of time,' said Jaarsma, who was co-recipient of the 2006 John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award, New York Feast: Radical Hospitality In Contemporary Art
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