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Tanah Dumpah Darah. 2010
Installation
(Detail)
The artist arranging products based on palm oil, which are of daily use in Germany.


Tanah Dumpah Darah. 2010
Installation
Painting, drawings on cardboard, 15 fiberglass heads, objects

The first part of the work shows the jungle in Papua being clear cut to make way for huge palm oil plantations. In front of this image on the wall, the heads of aborigines sink into the mud of the bird’s-head-shaped peninsula in eastern Indonesia. In the second part of the installation, the Javanese artist answers his own work, now from a Berlin perspective: the destruction in faraway Papua is rooted in the anonymous big-city life of the West, for hardly any product of our daily life is without palm oil. And Indonesia is its primary producer.

Finding One’s Identity in Hypercultural Space
A German-Indonesian Exchange Project

Indonesian art: in Germany, until recently people thought primarily of Balinese temple masks in anthropological museums. In the course of globalization, when a few progressive curators recognized that contemporary art plays a role also in countries like Indonesia, works by Indonesian artists began appearing more and more frequently in European exhibitions. But usually these were the same already internationally successful artists. No curator will burn his fingers with such a selection, because the works generally already conform to the globalized taste of the art world and thus fit Western understanding.


(από το nafas art magasine)