Projectby9

RUBANAH

Project by 9 membuka diri bagi berbagai kemungkinan kerjasama dengan penekanan pada proses dialog untuk memperkatya gagasan artistik dan tematik yang bermuara pada acara pameran, presentasi, diksusi seni rupa.

Di akhir 2015, bekerjasama dengan Hyphen — (hyphen.web.id), Enin Supriyanto menerbitkan buku kumpulan esai seni rupa yang ia tulis selama masa 1994-2015. Peluncuran buku itu disertai pameran Belum Ada Judul (Sangkring Art Space, Yogayakarta). Di acara itu Enin menyatakan undur diri alias pensiun dari kerja sebagai kurator seni rupa. Ia menyatakan bahwa ia akan mulai mengelola acara seni rupa secara swakelola di bawah nama—Projectby9.

Projectby9 adalah upaya untuk mengadakan berbagai kegiatan seni rupa dalam skala kecil, sederhana dan kolaboratif. Projectby9 hadir sebagai ruang kerjasama untuk seniman, kurator, peneliti bidang seni rupa, dan lain-lain. Projectby9 telah mengadakan beberapa pameran, antara lain: Jabbar Muhammad “Potret Parallax” (kurator: Hendro Wiyanto, iCAN, Jogja, 2016); Widi Pangestu “Everything in Between” (kurator: Ignatia Nilu, iCAN, Jogja, 2017), peluncuran dan pameran komik karya R.E. Hartanto “Tales From The Lonely Hill” (Krack! Gallery, Yogyakarta, 2018).

RUBANAH (Ruang Bawah Tanah) bertempat di ruang bawah tanah sebuah gedung di pusat keriuhan Jakarta. Rubanah adalah ruang pertemuan untuk berbagi informasi dan pengetahuan, ruang belajar bersama bagi seniman, kurator, peneliti atau penulis, atau siapa saja yang berminat memperkaya pengalaman dan memperdalam pengetahuan mengenai seni rupa kontemporer.

Wisma Geha (Basement)Jalan Timor No. 25, Menteng, Jakarta 10350www.projectby9.com

Projectby9

RUBANAH

Projectby9 is open to all possible cooperation with an emphasis on the dialogue process that can enrich the artistic and thematic ideas that lead to exhibitions, presentations, art discussions.

Towards the end of 2015, Enin Supriyanto and Hyphen — (hyphen.web.id) published a collection of his art-related essays from 1994-2015. In the book launching event, Enin declared his retirement from curatorial work. He wanted to independently produce (or co-produce) art events on a self-managed and self-help basis under the name: Projectby9 .

Projectby9 is an effort to hold art activities in small scale, simple and collaborative. It presupposes itself as a cooperative space for artists, curators, researchers in the field of fine arts, and others. Since Enin’s retirement has held several solo exhibitions, such as: Jabbar Muhammad “Portrait of Parallax” (curator: Hendro Wiyanto, iCAN, Jogja, 2016); Widi Pangestu “Everything in Between” (curator: Ignatia Nilu, iCAN, Jogja, 2017), comic book launch and exhibition by R.E. Hartanto “Tales From The Lonely Hill” (Krack! Gallery, Yogyakarta, 2018).

RUBANAH (abbreviation for ruang bawah tanah, lit.: basement) is located in the basement of a building in the center of Jakarta’s hubbub. RUBANAH is a meeting space for sharing information and knowledge, a shared learning space for artists, curators, researchers or writers, or anyone interested in deepening and enriching the experience and knowledge of contemporary art

Image courtesy of RUBANAHMelintas Bunyi (Tracking sound, exhibition shots)Solo exhibition of Julian Abraham ‘Togar’, 27.04-18.05.2019

Image courtesy of the artistLocation: Lake Siais, Southern Tapanuli, Northern Sumatra

Many of you may know M. Irfan as a photo realistic painter. His line-up of subject matter spanning portraits, vehicles and infrastructure (such as railway tracks, roads, planes, cars), partial sculptures from the Renaissance period, workshop tools; people and things we might encounter in the real world. For Irfan, it was the urge to draw that drove him to make these paintings. In hindsight, this can be seen as reflecting a broader tendency amongst artists born in 1970s Indonesia. In 2001, S. Teddy D. (1970-2016) succinctly formulated this tendency: “Paintings are drawings that have been either complicated or simplified.” Drawing certainly has an interesting position for this generation of artists. For Irfan, these drawings of easily recognisable things may guide the viewer into making their own stories between the lines. Trains are just trains. Bridges are just bridges. What may become a narrative from these stark images are highly dependent on the viewer. An engineer, for example, might be able to recognize in which year the vehicles or infrastructure depicted were built. This might lead them down their own narrative path, following the materials or technology used in relation to the socio-economic situation of the time. Dr. Ichwan Azhari, a historian from PUSSIS Unimed, North Sumatra, for example, reads these artworks differently. To him, Irfan’s work renders visible colonial histories and legacies in Sumatra, as his drawings focus on things circulating in or around the asphalt roads that were built by colonizers to make faster transit for commodity goods.

Irfan says that, “[his] drawing phase tends to uniformize people’s view. It [the object drawn] is an output. Because an object [that we are familiar with] appears as is, and we can really see it, it tends to limit our view, our thoughts of it, based on our baggage. My paintings become some sort of exit.” He continues by comparing this period of work to an earlier one in which he explored the materiality of paintings. From the mid 1990s until mid 2000s, Irfan used to paint, not to ‘draw’ with paint as described above, but to explore the medium itself. In this phase his work was often labelled abstract expressionist or minimalist. Even though both phases technically resulted in paintings, in this first phase he sees his process as a painterly one, rather than being routed in drawing. Lines, textures and compositions in his canvases are meant to trigger feelings and senses, connoting nouns (such as: ‘gap’) or verbs (such as: ‘spill’). What is spilling? Or, what has just been spilled? Does it flow or ooze? Where to and why? These unfamiliar images are meant to trigger an aesthetic experience, rather than any form of reading. What each viewer sense from these body of work will never be the same. Recalling this phase as ‘painting the essences’, Irfan sees these works as entry points. Instead of being allegorical —or being narrative—, Irfan’s paintings are the allegory itself.

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In this exhibition you will encounter a new phase in Irfan’s artistic practice. No more drawing, no more painting. The desire to draw and necessity to paint have been replaced with something more solid: “I am in search of the concrete,” Irfan says. What is concrete (beyond a material)? Historically, within art practices in Indonesia, concretism appeared only briefly towards the end of 1970s, most prominently in literature and music. In 1975, for example, poet Danarto refused to speak on a stage where he was scheduled to read his poetry. Instead he displayed several paintings (his own) and asked dancers to perform with tissue paper streaming out of boxes behind them. The tissue paper had the word “word” written on its entire length. At the time, Danarto had lost his trust in the conventional pronunciation of words. He wanted to allow the word to appear as is—as text, as itself. In 1979, artist Siti Adiyati exhibited a small pond full of water punctuated by hyacinth with golden flowers. At the time, the Jakarta government was engaged in a war against the plant, which they deemed to be useless. Adiyati believed the opposite. For her, the plants could be useful for people living along the rivers. In the same exhibition, Bonyong Munni Ardhi exhibited his own studio door as his artwork. He refused to be like his predecessors who according to him, “merely represented poverty and revolution” in their artworks. To Bonyong, art could not represent anything, so he used readymade objects to signify themselves. As concrete as it gets.

With this lineage, we learn that the use of ‘concrete’ is not rooted in the similar reasons or arguments, let alone sequence, with the context of Futurism (founded in Italy in 1912) or Dadaism (Swiss, USA, Paris, around 1915-1922), It is nothing like composer Pierre Schaeffer’s music concrete, which is about liberating the material from its contextual barriers, or Tristan Tzara’s effort in fighting for the existence of typography and pronunciation’s independent aesthetic. ‘The term ‘concrete’ in our artistic vernacular is used to describe a continuation of realism, if not its exaggeration. “To be concrete” means “to be even more real than realism”. Realism’ is in itself an ideology, a concept and a genre that firstly, departs from reality and secondly, tries to depict reality (or part of it) as faithfully as possible. In other words; Realism copies or represents the real.

Irfan’s statement—“in search of the concrete”—needs to be read not only in relation to his own trajectory, but in the context of the artistic practices surrounding him. Though he studied crafts, he began his artistic career with abstract painting, subsequently developing his realist use of painting as a practice of drawing. Within these two phases, he explored the possibility for images to serve as ‘figures of speech’. There are inevitable distances between his canvases, us as viewers and the artist himself. First, the physical distance between viewers and the paintings. Second, the distance between what Irfan imagines the images will be and the final result. Third, the distance between our knowledge as viewers and the meaning(s) that can be created. However, in this exhibition the ‘concrete’ Ifran has been in search of manifests as sculpture and installation.

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Image courtesy of the artistLocation: Lake Diatas, Solok, Western Sumatra

As with Bonyong’s studio door, Ifran’s concrete objects are not representations, signifiers or signs, they are not figures of speech, but literally themselves. Collapsing the distance between viewer and object these works invite us to move between them, to become immersed. For Irfan, these works are only be completed when the viewer becomes part of them, their physical gestures and movements, their thoughts and reflections, taking part within and joining with the installation to form a whole.

During his process of research for this body of work, Irfan travelled thousands of kilometres in Sumatra. On the West coast he spent two months going from Lampung province to Sabang, a small island above Aceh. He then took a two-week break before continuing his peregrination back to Lampung, but this time navigating through the middle of the island. All in all, Irfan’s peregrination took almost five months. This was not meant as a heroic gesture, it was simply a necessity. For Irfan, this journey was a process of reconnecting with rural Indonesia, with the land. He felt many of the situated forms of knowledge, which often manifest as sayings passed down through generations, were further and further away from our daily realities, abstracted. Hearing the saying Gemah ripah loh jinawi , for example, for many our only connection to the landscape described would be via the logo of the Yogyakarta airport taxis. We have no lived experience of the kind of peaceful, fertile natural environment that would have been home to the people who first coined this idiom. Not only have we become alienated from the original context of such phrases, we have adapted their situated wisdoms, either because of ignorance or as a product of our cosmopolitan urban lifestyle. A clear example of this adaptation can be seen in the phrase: Alah bisa karena biasa . Nowadays, we tend to think that it means either; ‘Any difficult task will be easy if you are used to it’; and / or ‘It is not about being smart, only practice makes perfect’. Unlike this positive reading, the idiom initially had a rather more negative connotation. Language expert Jus Badudu traced the origin of the words in this phrase and found that here the use of the word ‘bisa’ is not what it first seems. As well as the literal meaning of “can”, it was also a term for “snake poison”, which is its intended meaning in this case. So, the idiom actually means, “Bad habits are like poison, the more one is used to bits and pieces of it, the more one becomes immune to it”. Irfan’s months on the road were indeed a peregrination. He embarked on this journey with the belief that the archipelago needed to be experienced spatially and empirically with his own body in order to be understood. This peregrination was his concrete way to achieve such experience, much like his brand-new installations that demand our physical presence in order to complete their concreteness.

Jatiwangi, 11 July 2019Grace Samboh

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Image courtesy of the artistFerry from Merak, Banten, towards Bakauheni, Southern Lampung

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M. IRFAN Born in 1972 in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, M. Irfan lives and works in Yogyakarta. He studied metal craft at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) - Yogyakarta, where he co-founded Kelompok Seni Rupa Jendela, an artists’ group known for their experimental minimalist aesthetics since the end of 1990s. Irfan experimented with different styles including photorealism, surrealism, optical art, abstract, and minimalist. Irfan has exhibited locally including at the National Gallery of Indonesia (Jakarta) and internationally in Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Korea, United Kingdom, France and the United States.

Image courtesy of the artistLocation: Lake Siais, Southern Tapanuli, Northern Sumatra

Image courtesy of the artistLocation: Penuh River, Padang Aro, Solok, Western Sumatra

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTProject commissionerEnin Supriyanto

Project managerAkmalia Rizqita

Production & installation Rudi HendriatnoEri PriyantoPatrio SaputraFauzi RizalRiri SuheriSutomoMasrizal Koto

Video production Al GozWinanto

RoadtripWinanto Muhammad YaminAjie 53BGJohn LempoYudi Fachrie (Pak Jam)KimungRembolUdin SiantarWidhi

SupportMiming AmirangMona Ratu KhalisaBintang OmarRakaik TarukoDodi TarukoGarin AmsterdamDoni Medan