Nindityo Adipurnomo is perhaps the only artist who has consistently delved into and critiqued Javanese culture's repression of women through the konde, a traditional hair bun.
As a boy, Nindityo, currently one of Indonesia's foremost contemporary artists, admired the beauty of the hairpiece, worn by his mother and grandmother.
But as he grew up, he came to see the burden it represented to women, how they were required to wear it even as they suffered the heat, trapped at the neck.
The konde is like a prison, he once said. As the bun became his tool for revealing and presenting the hidden messages of sacred symbols in his culture, it also became a tool to rebuke such symbols.
In the interactive installation Massage a la the Hairbun Party, for instance, visitors are encouraged to walk across a pile of stone hair buns to get a foot massage.
After a decade of using the konde to make serious statements, Nindityo has found pleasure, sensual pleasure to be precise, in the making of the once detested bun. This is evident in his solo exhibition "WWWdotJava", on show until Feb. 14 at the non commercial Rumah Seni Yaitu in Semarang, Central Java.
Alluding not to Muslim recitation but rather to the way the konde shape appears again and again in different places Dzikir stands out among his new works. Tasbih, the Muslim rosary, further explores the theme of repetition.
Nindityo said he was at a dead end when he started the work. Bored with the konde, he could not get rid of it, as it had become fixed to his entire being. So, lacking other ideas, he started to play with the bun, cutting it in half. The two halves appeared to him to be like a woman's buttocks that, when shoved against each other, produced a sound that aroused his erotic senses.
This is how Dzikir came to be created. A combination of fun and ingenuity, the work consists of two halves of a black konde made of rattan, supported by studs made of horn, which move through a special, built-in device.
Whether Nindityo will continue to make such numerous works is unknown, but the konde may take a back seat as a metaphor.
Nindityo has already started to use furniture to express his concern over today's patriarchic society. The Paternalistic Story from Java, a 2006 work which is included in this exhibition, makes reference to the male-centric values of colonial and pre-colonial Java, which continue today.
Three rocking chairs representing the old, ostentatiously manly colonial society and other ornamental chairs symbolize feudalistic tendencies that continue to the present day. It will be interesting to see the next evolution in his creative career.
WWWdotJava
A solo exhibition by Nindityo Adipurnomo
Until Feb. 14, 2009
Rumah Seni Yaitu
Kampung Jambe 280, Semarang,
Central Java
Phone. 024 8414892 / 70184240
E-mail: yaitu_art@yahoo.com
