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Mella Jaarsma: 25 years of shapes and shadows
The name Mella Jaarsma in Indonesia usually conjures up the image of a tall blond Dutch artist, of burqas as metaphors, and of Cemeti, the gallery in Yogyakarta she so successfully led with her handsome Javanese husband Nindityo Adipurnomo to become a major venue for change in Indonesia since 1988
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he name Mella Jaarsma in Indonesia usually conjures up the image of a tall blond Dutch artist, of burqas as metaphors, and of Cemeti, the gallery in Yogyakarta she so successfully led with her handsome Javanese husband Nindityo Adipurnomo to become a major venue for change in Indonesia since 1988.
But her retrospective "The Fitting Room", opening on Oct. 27 at the National Gallery in Jakarta, will focus on her artistic creations, which have made a mark in Indonesia and abroad during her 25 years living in Yogyakarta. Surely her most recent creation Square Body refers back to the fascination with shadows she developed when she first arrived in Indonesia in 1984.
Courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Square Body, which was first performed live at the opening of the exhibition "Beyond the Dutch" in Utrecht on Oct. 15, is a fascinating play of light and shadow representing the border between the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the intangible. A male and two females wear dresses on which and in between which move shadows of the four kanda, creatures or elements that in Balinese belief accompany a person as shadows of protection throughout life.
Bali had earlier inspired her work in Pralina Fire Altar (1993), a sculpture containing a cremation oven that she constructed in the village of Munduk in northern Bali.
The idea emerged from the tradition of the inhabitants of the village, who cremated their dead on a bed of banana tree trunks, then gathered the ashes and shaped them into the form of a baby, which they then laid on a cloth.
Living in Indonesia for more than 20 decades, Mella Jaarsma's feelings are those of an Indonesian artist who recognizes the artist's place, role and significance in society.
In the late 1990s, as social, political, ethnic and religious tensions heightened in Indonesia and culminated in exceptional racial violence, the haunting meaning of identity became an even more pressing consideration in her art.
Having had to endure public perceptions of her "otherness" as an individual, that is, one with a white skin and European features, even the every day question "asal dari mana" (where do you come from?) made her feel awkward. Confronted with racism, her understanding of minorities became even more profound.
The varied cultural interpretations of the frog became a medium for her to express concern over issues of cultural difference and racial diversity, where a waning tolerance for multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies is now perceptible. Frogs, a delicacy in Chinese cuisine, a nickname for the Netherlands - which is also known as "kikkerland" or land of the frogs - and a prohibited food item for Muslims, became a metaphor for the human condition.
Skinless frogs began to fill her canvases, transposed as embryos or naked, sexless human bodies and offering modern statements on gender relations as well as on the decline in tolerance and racial diversity.
Hi Inlander (Hello Native), an installation featuring the Muslim burqa, was part of a joint exhibition titled "Wearable" held in 1999 at Galeri Padi, Bandung and Bentara Budaya Yogyakarta. Here, Mella considered the term "Inlander", a derogatory word for indigenous Indonesians used by the Dutch during the colonial era, drawing an interesting parallel between what happened during that period and the events of May 1998, when ethnic Chinese became the target of killings and anxious residents, Chinese and others, hung signs outside their houses reading Pribumi (indigenous, native), or Pribumi Muslim (Indigenous Muslim). Using dried frog skins to make the burqa, she sought to transcend the Muslim taboo on frogs while at the same time showing the suffocating effects of narrow-mindedness.
At the opening of the exhibition, the oppressiveness was palpable when Jaarsma's work was brought to life by a man wearing the burqa; the model had to be replaced every two hours for fear he would faint because of the stifling effects of the costume. Pribumi (Native), another pejorative word often used in the discriminative sense, was the title of a performance in which fried frog-legs were served in Jalan Malioboro, Yogyakarta's famous busy shopping street.
Similar installations/performances of Hi Inlander took place at the 1999 Asia Pacific Triennale, where members of her audience were asked to cook and eat the cuisines of different cultures, while dressed in cloaks created by the artist from various animal skins such as frog, fish, kangaroo and chicken.
The burqa, which is usually worn by women in the Arab countries and from which the jilbab - an Indonesian version - is derived, developed in Mella's art to suggest signifiers associated with coverage of the self: representation and manipulation of the self, camouflage, masks, shields, hiding places, sanctuaries, and the like. This found expression in Moral Pointers (2002), a live performance installation that featured veils made of cocoons, horns, dried animal skins, plants with other media.
SARA-swati, another work from the exhibition, featured a burqa made from the trunks of dried banana plants from which dozens of artificial fingers appeared as if pointing, signifying the relationship between an individual and a society that is constantly seeking scapegoats for its actions.
In fact, according to the book Mella Jaarsma in Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens, SARA-swati is a play on the Indonesian acronym SARA, which stands for "Suku-Agama-Ras-Antar-golongan" (Ethnicity/Tribe-Religion-Race-Intergroup) often associated with subversion during the Suharto era, and Saraswati, the Javanese/Hindu goddess of art and education.
"I am interested in cultural identities that are seeking to escape their origins," she once said. "I believe in flexible identities that are related to recent actions. Here, the many layers of an individual are difficult to identify. We are like temporary buildings with facades and where the interiors may change. We have a second skin that we wear. This is like a house in which we can hide, or then again, we could choose to leave. We have to be ready to live in the house or to leave it."
Shadows have been her first fascination since she came to Jakarta in the early 1980s, when she deliberately lived in a shabby boarding house to experience the shadows on the wall produced by candlelight when the electricity failed. Moving to Yogyakarta, she enjoyed the wayang performances and the flickering of the lampu templek, traditional wall lamps, along the sidewalk warungs where the shadows of visitors were reflected on the cloth partitions separating them. Shadows became a metaphor for the human body in all its various forms and positions vis-*-vis space, tradition, culture, religion and politics.
While Mella has for a long time been associated with works of the burqa, today she is coming back to the shadow, emphasizing her enduring fascination with the mysteries that continue to dominate human life between the tangible and the intangible.
The works will be featured on more than 20 live models at the openings at the National Gallery on Oct. 27 and Selasar Sunaryo on Nov. 14.
Fitting Room
Solo exhibition of 25 years oeuvre by Mella Jaarsma
National Gallery, Jakarta
Oct. 27 to Nov. 8
Selasar Sunaryo, Bandung
Nov. 14 to Dec. 6
