This year’s exhibition was their fourth, and it carried the theme of “DAILY LIFE : Knowing The Sign of Time”. As the theme implied, the artworks showed daily objects of Indonesian lives, through different mediums, from painting to woodcut to photography to mixed media installation.
Unfortunately this major exhibition had a rather poor promotion, and there were not a lot of young people who were into visual arts actually noticed about this event, which was held for merely 18 days.
I went there with Titing and Nida on the last day of the exhibition, exploring the three big halls of the National Gallery. I am making three posts for Manifesto, based on the halls where the artworks were displayed.
Part 1. Hall A
Hall A is the main hall of the gallery, and the artworks shown in this part of the National Gallery were the best ones, especially if seen from their creative ideas and the way they could reach both the senior and younger art enthusiasts.
There was a family tree of an Arab-descendant Saleh Husein, made using charcoals and yarns on one side of the wall. On the opposite wall was three rolling canvases of calligraphic images representing the statue of Liberty by David Armi Putra. In the same room, I saw Dito Yuwono’s work which he exhibited at MES56 earlier this year. My personal favourite from this hall was the woodcut by Irwanto Lentho, for its detailed works and the images of turtles 😛
There was also Agan Harahap’s awesome photoshop works, which combined international celebrity with Indonesian daily lives, eg. Jay-Z at a Padang restaurant, Paris Hilton being caught by the local police, and Rihanna leaving a public toilet. Unfortunately instead of being printed (ie. it would be nice to make them like polaroids), there was only a TV screen showing a slideshow of the images.
oxalis 