COMPARISON BETWEEN MALAYSIAN

AND OTHER SOUTHEAST ASIAN ARTIST

MALAYSIA & INDONESIA
Jompet Kuswidananto
Jompet Kuswidananto was born in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 1976.
He trained as a musician, but practices in the Contemporary Art field,
and has a strong interest in theater.

He has exhibited in
Modernization & Urbanization at Marronnier Art Center, Seoul (2003);
3rd Fukuoka Art Triennale (2005),
Equatorial Rhythms at Stenersenmuseet, Oslo (2007);
Yokohama Triennale (2008);
Jakarta Biennale XIII (2009); 1
0e Biennale de Lyon (2009), Kuandu
Biennial (2010) and
The Tradition of the New at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai (2010).

He has had solo shows at Osage Gallery (2009, 2010) and Cemeti Art
House, Yogyakarta (2008).
The exhibition is titled "Java's
Machine: Phantasmagoria".
The basic idea behind the imagery comes from the royal guards whom we still see
today watching over the Sultan's Palace in that city.
The corps is known as Lombok Abang (red chili), named for the characteristic red hue of their uniform. In War of Java: Do You Remember? *1, Jompet uses the figure of
the guard and that red to represent magic and syncretism in Javanese society today.
In the corridors of the gallery stand five figures of soldiers, presented as if they were ghosts from the past.
The figures are not lifelike; Jompet only erected the caps, music instruments, the guns and the boots on his stand-ins.
The sonic instrument emits a statement spoken in three languages: Indonesian, English, and Javanese.
It is a kind of story on how modern Java was constructed by war after war, colonization after colonization, and the establishment of industrialism.
Jompet continues his narrative through a video running on a television installed not far from the icons. In a follow-up video, War of Java: Do You Remember? *2, we see
the figure of a man surrounded by the machine that has been refining sugar on the island since the early 1890s.
The video was shot in the Madukismo factory, an early plant set up in Java which is still operational today. The machines used at this sugar factory often serve as a
symbol of modernity in Javanese society.
The man in the video is naked above the waist and wears the black trousers usually worn only by farmers. His stylized movements come from traditional Javanese folk
dance, creating a contradictory juxtaposition of old and new, low tech and high.
Starting from the idea of tracing the history of modernity represented by the sugar machine, Jompet searches out the syncretism in Javanese society evident in the
uniform of Javanese soldier, the juxtaposition of magic and machine, likewise the traditional and the modern, and the classic duality of East and West.
The troops in Sultan Palace by custom play percussion instruments whenever they march. Jompet puts another four guardsmen with drums into an installation with a
backdrop video of a man dancing a Javanese folk dance.
Interestingly, Jompet has worked out a system that connects the drumbeats with the man's movements in the video.
Poetic images stand out in War of Java: Do You Remember? *3. Jompet installed almost the complete uniform for the soldiers, only the boots are missing. By cutting the
legs of the soldiers, and projecting text on a vinyl screen on the floor -- an abstraction from Thomas Stanford Raffles's famous text: The History of Java -- Jompet creates
the sense the three soldiers are standing in water.
Aside from this installation's strong conceptual underpinnings, it also conveys a quiet and lonely ambience.
From that solitude, the audience is then guided to view the visual recording of a man, in a video close-up shoot, talking about something without any sound.
The man's voice can be heard only after we put on the headphones provided in front of the television. And here it is: a whisper that terrorizes our memory. "Do you
remember, in 1629, Sultan Agung sent his troops back to Batavia? Do you remember?"
On the exhibition's opening night, Jompet arranged a performance to accompany this piece, in which actor Bahrul Ulum occupied a chair and worked through a series of
expressions from a stone-faced lack of reaction to panic, which some viewers found dramatic and memorable.
The exhibition presents a good example of the development of new applications of media in contemporary visual arts today. With his background in broadcasting while
studying at Gadjah Mada University, Jompet has combined the use of visual and audio techniques as materials for art works. Earlier versions of these pieces were
exhibited at the Yokohama Triennale 2008.
The atmosphere created in the exhibition space points up Jompet's focus on the quest for Javanese identity. By using symbols and icons that are quite popular among
Indonesians, he has built a way to communicate with his audience through collective memory and to underline the ideas of contact, syncretism, and the specter of
modernization in our society.
Even though Jompet works from the premise of Javanese-ness as his basic idea, in terms of both his forms and concepts, the imagery as a whole has moved beyond that
limitation. These are the questions we pose about our identity nowadays, not about where we come from, or who we are, but about what has constructed us and how we
are represented.
Jompet Kuswidanantos Javas
Machine at the 10th Lyon Biennale,
Lyon, France.
he installation of the Javanese Royal
phantom guards
in Javas machine: Phantasmagoria,
speaks of the hybrid nature and syncretism
of Javanese culture,
o denote that there is no such thing as a
pure culture.
ontemporary Art in Indonesia Its Worth the Trip
Brian Poole
Most people know only the island of Bali in Indonesia, a popular tourist attraction. On the worlds biggest archipelago an interesting scene for
contemporary art has been developing for some years now. Here a short travelogue by the freelance curator Katerina Valdivia Bruch.
For nearly 350 years Indonesia was a Dutch colony. In 1949 the socialist government under the leadership of Sukarno came to power, followed by 32
years of Suhartos fascist dictatorship, which lasted until 1998. Since 2004 Indonesia has been experiencing its first democratic period. The
contemporary art scene is being influenced by the social and political development of the country, and it is predominately represented in cities such as
Yogyakarta, Bandung and the capital, Jakarta.
For some time now artists as yet without state support have been organising themselves into artists initiatives in order to develop educational
programmes, places for research, exhibitions, and exchanges between artists. The first and now the most established artists initiative is Cemeti Art
House. It was founded by the artists Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo in Yogyakarta in 1988. In addition to exhibitions, artists talks, book
presentations and conferences they also offer 3 month resident programmes for artists from Indonesia and the Netherlands.

A mixture of art and socially critical engagement can be found at Ruangrupa in Jakarta, where art is practiced predominately in public space: it can be
experienced on the street as well as in highbrow shopping malls. Another place for art with a multi-disciplinary programme is Selasar Sunaryo Art
Space, founded by the famous artist Sunaryo in Bandung.

In Indonesia, art history is scarcely present; rather, artists tend to deal with the history of their country. Artists act as mediators of information. They find
the latest trends in art on the internet, and they relay and discuss them in blogs and on Facebook profiles. The foreign infl uences are largely from China,
and they are very much determined by the market. Indonesian art consists of a mixture of traditional and contemporary element s. You find here mostly
painting, but you will also encounter many works with a strong performative character.
Curators are incredibly important in this mixed scene; they determine the success of the exhibitions. Good galleries often employ several curators,
usually former art critics. The chief curator of Selasar Sunaryo Art Space is the young Agung Hutjatnikajennong, who curated the Jakarta Biennale this
year. Fluid Zones is a successful exhibition of young art; it discusses the trade and exchange in the Southeast Asian region.

Here you could see the installation Mellow by Iswanto Hartono that exemplifies the theme of the Biennale, or the works of Eko Nugroho, who had
already been exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in Berlin in 2005 and who has left his artistic mark upon a wall in the
Berlin neighbourhood called the Wrangelkiez. Currently living in Yogyakarta, the artists works are fascinating a political and humorous combination
of comics, graffiti, sculptures, sketches, embroideries, video and, recently, a reinterpretation of Wayang: the traditional shadow puppet theatre. Also from
Yogyakarta is the artist Kuswidananto, also known as Jompet, who was invited to the Yokohama Triennale to exhibit his Javas Machine:
Phantasmagoria. This work is an extraordinary example of a multitude of disciplines, combining video, sound art, and performance. The richly
interpretive installation depicts Javanese soldiers as ghosts, inviting us to take a critical look at Indonesian history.

Roofing the Indonesian floaters,
artwork by Jompet Kuswidananto
book, wood, mechanical, digital voice
JOMPET KUSWIDANANTO
2010