It’s Friday afternoon, and the spiffy art lovers of Jakarta and beyond are pouring into the JIEXPO convention centre, ready to see, talk, and buy. Spirits are high, coffee is flowing, and excitement fills the air.
Since 2009, the fair, created by MRA Media, has become a landmark calendar event in the city’s cultural scene. But with over 70 local, regional, and international galleries, where on earth to begin?
Here are four presentations that amused, enlightened, inspired, and delighted us this year.
A+ Works of Art: Art is serious business
Regrettably, this particular iteration of the Kuala Lumpur gallery’s booth was a one-day-only affair — the works will be switched out for each day of Art Jakarta. But the bizarre “prison cell” booth created by Singaporean art collective Vertical Submarine is hard not to talk about.
Entitled Leaving Room, the exhibition is blocked off by steel bars with gaps of varying sizes, which visitors have to wiggle through. On two walls hang a set of paintings satirising the colourful characters of the art world. With tongue-in-cheek titles like The Body of an Art Dealer Lying in the Room after a Meeting, these works provide a top-down peek into various hotel and private rooms, calling to mind a game of Cluedo (in the director’s office with the candlestick — price upon request!).
Perched on the toilet or lying in bed, the artists, collectors, and art professionals populating these rooms have a certain pathetic air. And deliberately so — Leaving Room is intended to convey entrapment, a sense that these individuals are imprisoned within their thoughts, choices, and the art world itself. Or as the Eagles would put it: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
The booth is not without its shortcomings, accessibility chief among them (the narrowness of the entrance strikes us as a bit thoughtless; also, the Joker references feel too on-the-nose). Still, it’s just the right sort of self-deprecating — and yet somehow also self-aggrandising — humour for an art fair crowd. Certainly The Gallerist awake in his Hotel Room during an Art Fair is a scene playing out in hotel rooms across Jakarta this weekend, this writer’s included.
Yet, Leaving Room isn’t just good for shared chuckles and knowing nods. It leaves us with the productive questions of what it means to take art and all its trimmings too seriously, or just unseriously enough.
“Spot”: Indonesian artists talk power and planet
A four-metre-tall canvas, depicting a rearing white horse and fluttering flags. A stack of orange binders, surrounded by grotesque paintings. A large wooden block, teetering on spindly tree-root legs. And a dense tangle of fishing nets and assorted debris.
These four large-scale installations by Indonesian artists form Art Jakarta’s specially curated “Spot” section, located in the middle of the fair. Here, issues of power and ecology take centre stage.
In Dismantling Nostalgia, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno collages romantic views of villages and paddy fields into a backdrop for an imposing monument. Doing so, he draws our attention to two kinds of images used for political, propagandistic ends: the mooi indie (“beautiful Indies”) painting tradition, implicated in the Dutch colonial enterprise, and public monuments, used to stir up feelings of patriotism and pride.
Tisna Sanjaya’s Ganjel, meanwhile, looks back at his years devoted to the teaching of art, and the persistent political critiques mounted by his own practice. Convinced that it’s important to preserve an art school’s archives, he’s collated documents, books, and other materials from his work as a fine arts lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology, along with paintings from the last two years expressing his political observations and fears for his country. All this is soundtracked by the call of the sirit uncuing or cuckoo, associated in parts of Indonesia with death.
Art, for Tisna, acts as a warning — the canary in the coal mine, making us sit up and notice the forces of corruption and oppression suffocating our collective futures.
Nearby, Syaiful Garibaldi’s Antara Muara and Iwan Yusuf’s Air Pasang focus on local environmental problems. Echoing the architecture of traditional stilt houses, the former was originally constructed on-site at a West Javanese coastal village affected by erosion. Made from mushroom leather and leftover wood, the piece feels not dead but dormant, caught somewhere between permanence and transience — its mangrove-root forms could protect against erosion, yet it also seems as if at any moment it could come alive and scuttle away.
Strung up just above the ground, Air Pasang is a jungly cluster of rope, fishing nets, and marine debris. The work emerges from Iwan’s observations of how the ocean tides bring everything back to shore. If we continue down the path we’re on, soon they will return little but our own refuse — bottles, tires, buoys, the detritus of human existence. The cobwebby nets and suspended objects are as sobering as they are strangely beautiful.
ShanghART Singapore: Robert Zhao makes the news
Amidst the chaos and ostentation present at any art fair, ShanghART’s pale blue booth is a vision in minimalism. There’s very little in it except a couple of wooden frames, a stack of newspapers, and a blown-up black-and-white photograph of a tree stump.
This is New Forest, a site-specific installation by Singaporean artist Robert Zhao — currently representing the country at the Venice Biennale — that emerges from a giant Albizia tree felled by a storm in 2020. Zhao’s Institute of Critical Zoologists, a speculative research project, set up a motion-sensitive camera to capture what happened next — the slow decay of the trunk, the citizens of the forest who passed by.
These images have been turned into “newspapers,” in editions of 400, with a different version for each day of the fair. One paper is available for 11 SGD — it’s an unusual proposition, and a curious take on what might matter as “news.”
ROH Projects: A toast to art
Jakarta gallery ROH Projects’ presentation sprawls across several booths’ worth of real estate. It’s eclectic, but hangs together well, something deceivingly difficult to do.
Standout works abound: a lean white diptych by Aditya Novali, suggesting effaced text; waterfall prints by Atit Sornsongkram speckled with hectic dots of colour; from Shimon Minamikawa, an adorable, miniature spray-painted sign. Onward: stunning black-and-white canvases from Eko Nugroho, a departure from his signature flamboyant shades. Shinro Ohtake — subtly mesmerising resin works, in a thick, sticky purple textured with bubbles. Maruto Ardi — a book cover with a waltzing couple, a series of screws spiralling up the booth wall.
Yet within this plenitude, it’s a piece of mostly-eaten bread that stands out. Indonesian artist Aurora Arazzi’s Seakan-akan sisa takes the form of a realistic bread crust, abandoned on a porcelain-tiled shelf.
In a feat of illusionism, the artist has used paper to craft both crust and tiles alike. For the tiles, specifically, she precisely cut and layered tracing paper to create a bevelled edge and height; it’s terrific how convincing the result is.
What makes this work so attractive? Its simplicity and insignificance, of course, amidst the art fair showiness. The amount of effort poured into recreating something so mundane. The trickery, the element of surprise.
And the possibility, perhaps, of expanding our perception of what is beautiful — which is, perhaps, the truest art of all.
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Art Jakarta runs till 6 October 2024 at JIEXPO Kemayoran. Visit artjakarta.com for more.
Header image: Iwan Yusuf’s Air Pasang.
