Re-examining Dyah Retno’s Solo Exhibition titled ∆HRT =∆HOR+(∆HP-HR), which was presented from 2-30 July 2022 at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, we can explore the elaboration of concepts of “process”, “data” and “events”.
What do we know about Indomie, apart from its established existence as ubiquitous instant noodle? For many, Indomie performs as a fast track to obtain a budget decent meal. The decency value of Indomie can be adjusted according to various needs and a particular health ambition. The preference for Indomie is usually taken in favour of instantaneous, efficiency and economical values over the actual nutritional values contained in each noodle package. Eating is never not just about a matter of filling the fuel for our body-machines.
Several questions that arose during the undergone process, included ‘how do people interpret death today?’ Mainly how the pandemic had fractured the customs and traditions which communities live by. More specifically, we also contemplated whether changes in death rites have changed the way people view death. What do people believe in regards to death? How do people view bodies and corpses? How do people view the changes that occurred with death rites during the pandemic? Oblo and Enka’s collaboration attempts to present death through the fragments captured by the camera and recalled memories derived from their traumatic and magical experiences.This paper presents a description and analysis of the processes in producing the work entitled “Mati Sajroning Urip, Urip Sajroning Pati” (Death in Life, Life in Death). The first part highlights the body in context to the phenomenon of death. The medical perspective regarding the body shows a different position from the cultural perspective. The medical body is a biological body that can naturally grow and decay. The cultural body is a glorified body because it is formed from rudiments of society’s cosmology. The second part describes death rites and its alterations in society. In this case, we explicate mortuary rituals among Javanese people that is very innate in our daily life.
The short story entitled “Rotten Stench” by Eka Kurniawan presents an interesting bodily experience as there is only one full stop at the end of the two-thousand-word story, forcing us to read it non-stop, where throughout the story short pauses are only made available by commas, and since there is no full stop in between, it has no paragraphs either, thus, when we read the story, we will gasp for air, looking for escapes to catch our breath in between the endless sequence of sentence that tells the story of a rotten stench that entirely engulfed a city named Halimunda.
Ghost light is the entrance to then widen the gaze. The method we take is to re-abstract the artistic objects that Dalijo has created. Then parse the narratives around the installation elements and at the same time imagine the possible repertoire. Then pack it back into one statement: wound and venom I carry as I’m running.
In the context of Gegerboyo’s drawings, the process of fusion is the ‘sequential drawings’, and the anticipation of ‘illusion of the fusion process’ we have mentioned is therefore anticipation of ‘sequential illusion’. This is important, in order to see other potentials of Gegerboyo’s ‘anti-narrative’.
We can say that the “physical memory” of the “production process” is being emphasized, and it becomes Gegerboyo’s purpose beyond the textual meaning—as we usually expect will be—narrated in those drawings. In another word, Gegerboyo’s drawings do not “narrate something”, but rather they “situate us”.
In that context, we can no longer limit sketches to manual, hand-drawn scribbles on a piece of paper. In reality, images from the (digital) media have taken a role as “medium of sketches”. The presence of sketches, for Gegerboyo, has transformed into a far larger vehicle than the limited scope of a manual scribble on a paper.
The “non-systemic” drawing workflow that has been implemented by Gegerboyo is, in fact, an attempt to go beyond the boundaries of the consecutive system. As we can see in this exhibition, titled Gapura Buwana, the visual tsunami on Gegerboyo’s walls is fragmental instead of sequential—the fragments of the images interrupt one another, resulting in a visual solidity.
The issue that forms the basis of the artistic practices of Elia Nurvista and Youngho Lee, through which they attempt to draw connecting threads in this exhibition, is an enthusiasm for representing the phenomena of global migration of resources. They have investigated a number of these sources as historical issues, while others have been collected from contemporary encounters.
CEMETI 