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span class="inline inline-left">On Jakarta: Art enthusiasts at the Bentara Budaya gallery contemplate street scribe Andi Rharharha’s indoor graffiti at the Hybrid Project exhibit. JP/Talia ShadwellTraffic jams, graffiti and street-signs are the motifs peppering the work of young Jakarta artists given the opportunity to vent their frustrations at the smog-choked city they call home.

Patrons at the Hybrid Project’s opening show at Bentara Budaya gallery in Palmerah picked their way around an assembly of curious objects to the overtures of an industrial hum.

Bringing meaning to the madness is curator Annisa Rahadi, 25, an art theory graduate student from the Bandung Institute of Technology.

This month’s exhibition, she explained, was a chance for upcoming independent artists to air their criticisms of the “hard daily life” they experience in Jakarta.

“It’s about how they see the city with so many faults — but they’re part of it so they have to accept it.”

The Hybrid Project came about as a channel for young artists and musicians in Jakarta to conceptualize topics from contemporary Indonesian identity to globalization.

Putriani Mulyadi opted to accentuate the trials and tribulations of getting from A to B in Jakarta. She demonstrated how she scattered pastel-hued plastic letters across the gallery’s floor, obstructing the paths of people trying to view her fellow artists’ work.

Mulyadi, 24, believes the city’s traffic woes have become an increasingly common theme for Jakarta artists — “people don’t care about others — drivers or other people in traffic. I try to take that concept in my art.”

Andi Rharharha’s signature “Super Rha Rha Rha” is an omnipresent fixture of Jakarta’s underpasses and byways. For the Hybrid Project, the street artist took to Bentara Budaya’s walls in monochrome, using graffiti to record his suggestions for a “Jakarta city that is easy to control”.  

On an adjacent wall a teak-hued cartoon details city scenes in graphic simplicity. Frame by frame, fictional scenes accuse Jakartans of polluting their own city with abject complacency — fumes belching from factory chimneys loom over elderly women picking crops beneath, ojek-bound passengers smile at one another, neatly packed into an orderly traffic jam that has no equivalent in Jakarta-proper, and smokers blow smog clouds in perfect unison.

But Jakarta’s new generation of artists don’t deal exclusively in doom and gloom, insists Rahadi. “They don’t want to say Jakarta is bad … [the art] so they can have fantasies and ideas about the way it is in the future.”

Electronic circuit boards and a light installation are shrines to the digital communications technologies that are hard-wired into city dwellers’ social lives, while “Planet Love”, a collaborative work from Sebastianus Seni, Joshua Sentosa and Theo Frids, is the perfect ending note for an exhibition dominated by traffic complaints.

Their neat Japanese-inspired collages arrange manipulated digital photography with pressed flowers and pastel-patterned wallpaper. The effect is at once domestic and whimsical, and the intent of the clean, minimalist style is clear as the artists imagine a suburban Jakarta freed from crowding and pollution.

The Hybrid Project runs from Jan. 20 to 30 at Bentara Budaya, Jl. Palmerah Selatan no. 17, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.