Jakarta
Eddy Susanto is an avid reader and researcher of cultural phenomena around the world that resonate with similar occurrences in his beloved Java. The artist first gained notice through the work he exhibited at the Bandung Contemporary Art Awards that illustrated the arrival of Islam in Java by “appropriating” a composition by German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer. In depicting Islam’s mid-14th century arrival in Java with the arrival of the Renaissance in Europe in the late 14th to early 15th centuries, Eddy uses Javanese script to combine the telling of the former in the Babad Jawa chronicle with images from Dürer’s The Men’s Bathhouse. The visualization aims to juxtapose two events that occurred around the same period but thousands of leagues apart, and compares the arrival of Islam that liberated the Javanese people from ceremonial d...