Sensible Past: Of Distances and the Fabrication of the Frame -Mengindra Yang Lampau: Tentang Jarak dan Bangunan Bingkai

Exhibition Details: Sensible Past: Of Distances and the Fabrication of the Frame
Mengindra Yang Lampau: Tentang Jarak dan Bangunan Bingkai

*From Declaring Distance to a Sensible Past

In May 2022, the exhibition "Declaring Distance"(Menyatakan Jarak) was put up at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, as part of Atelier KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden) annual artist residency program. The residency, jointly commissioned by Amsterdam art space Framer Framed, was designed for artists to be able to engage with KITLV's archives and resources, which holds more than a century's worth of materials and research coming from Dutch former colonies and of their post-colonial period. The program was also a first step for the research institution in seriously experimenting among artistic and academic professionals in search of new methods, perspectives, and approaches for decolonial knowledge production.

The selected artist, Theo Frids, from Bandung, chose not only to work behind the walls of the archive, but also to utilise how the then condition of the archives itself relay and become relations for the social, economic and ecological realities in Bandung. This includes a network of other artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians which some already engage with the archives of KITLV, or are in exposure over how the recent development makes colonial archives–especially images–about Indonesia become more accessible through digital means of inquiry.

During the two months of "Declaring Distance" at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, the project was conceived as an immersed, sensible past, coming into being through artistic rooting in the exhibition format. The invited artists not only engage and do research with the archives and literature, but also disclose what glimpses of reality may be experienced by organising student workshops, special film screenings, musical performance, and a tour of Bandung's waterways, among others. The project then formed as a base for Theo's latter engagement with the institution in the Netherlands, making the imaginings of the local bodies to be in contact with their institutionalised depictions from the past.

Essentially, "Declaring Distance" was a means for appropriating past narratives through familiarity, whether it is to empathise or "be" inside the eye of those depicted in the images, through connecting the continuing legacies of indexed places, or through differences and what still persists as sensible and relevant. It is about how to relate through networks of images and imaginings, through image reperforming itself in the contemporary. This engagement with locales, and possible detournments, is what we believe important to be continued.

*Concept of the Proposal Sensible Past: Of Distances and the Fabrication of the Frame

As a next iteration and a continuation of the collaboration between the project partners (KITLV, Framer Framed and Integrated Arts, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung), we would like to submit this proposal - “Sensible Past: Of Distances and the Fabrication of the Frame.” The project envisions a further development and transfiguration of “Declaring Distance”, in particular on how the “frame” is fabricated; how our sensing perception to the past gets in touch, first and foremost, with the frame that was provided for us. The project also corresponds to the theme of this year's conference, the crossways of knowledge, evoking “the multiple modalities and serendipities of contemporary knowledge exchange between academia and society” through the lens of arts by creating vernacular, non-formal sites of learning and knowledge production. In order to engage with the conference participants, we would like to organise the exhibition potentially at the Universitas Airlangga (UNAIR), and at the Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Public Health which as far as we learn, is housed in an old colonial building.

The emphasis on the fabrication of the frame itself, led us to present the exhibition as a “pavilion”, stemming from a tradition from centuries ago, in a world of colonial settings. As fabricated and imagined realities from the colonies, the pavilion in, for instance, world expos, served as the principal device for people in other spheres of the world to sense and connect with the far faraway colonies. By utilising the same device from that past world, we would like to twist the sense of distance and exoticism with the eerie experience of a strange crossbreed of colonial imagination and our own imagination of the (colonial) past.

Pasar Gambir was a site for economic exchange, but on top of that, an expression of living modernity in the colonies, can be an apt reference for our exhibition, as it served not only as a communal space for physical goods, but ultimately, a common imagination. As this tradition is still living as a yearly event of Pekan Raya Jakarta, the long-standing practice of frame fabrication, literally and figuratively, is yet to come to fore and examined as the critical site for sensing the past. In contrast with the monumental structure of the colonial pavilion, our exhibition will start with the practical creation of a “frame” as a modular texture or surface. This frame will house various artworks, performances, and activations, while offering a perplexed experience in itself. This approach will be accompanied by an intended non-linear trajectories of engaging oneself in a space.

Inside the pavilion we will have a series of new paintings from Theo Frids Hutabarat, whose works offer a conceptual and fluid approach towards activating archival images. Further, collage works from Zaldy Armansyah will be on display, revealing the hidden social structures and power dynamics of the colonial era's everyday scenes; we will also a work by the new Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed residence artist Clara Jo’s video work Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood. The work addresses the trans-generational effects of historical erasures within the practice of quarantine in relation to the diaspora of indentured laborers in the Indian Ocean. In addition, we will set-up film screening programs by Gorivana Ageza and cooking sessions designed by Fajar Abadi. There will be a musical performance from students of Integrated Arts, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung. The musical performance will focus on the composition from Paul Seelig, a composer that trained in Europe and lived in Java from the 1900s, and whose musical composition combined tastes from the two worlds.

Through different artistic methods, the works make palpable the ongoing impacts caused by the colonial forces of framing and how artistic research can potentially reframe and redirect our perceptions. We consider the exhibition as an extended “reading” list for the ICAS conference, whereby the visitors from different disciplines and cultural-political backgrounds can engage with people from different parts of the world and with the locales in Indonesia to experience the detournments, and sense the past.