Foto Plazza

Agung Kurniawan:

ACTUS CONTRITIONIS

Images of Memory’s Shadows

If we are willing to accept and understand that (visual) art constitutes an active space that dynamically interacts with the society—just as science, politics, knowledge and even religion—we would be able to understand more easily the various themes that Agung Kurniawan presents in his work. This is because Agung Kurniawan in general does not present his work merely as a form of expression and as representation, but also as an experiment as well as an action to jolt our awareness about the social circumstances around us. Such a stance could already be discerned in Agung Kurniawan’s work in the nineties.

I still recall one of the works that the artist has made: a drawing on two panels, which he gave the title of Commemorating 30 Years of the Holy Family (1997) and presented in Galeri Cemeti (today’s Cemeti Art House), Yogyakarta, during the “Slot in the Box” exhibition.  Considering the social and political situations of the day, this particular work of Agung’s—because of its title as well as what the artist depicts there—easily gave rise to interpretations that view the work as a kind of insinuation and criticism about the power that Suharto and his family wielded, as throughout the thirty years that the patriarch had been in power in Indonesia (with his New Order regime), the family became a “holy family” that no one might criticize, much less insult.

It was clearly a provocative work—and quite subversive with regard to the declining power of the New Order regime in 1997, so much so that Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo, founders and managers of Galeri Cemeti, became concerned about the “safety” of the exhibition that they were holding, especially regarding the performance-art work (by FX Harsono) and the afore-mentioned work by Agung Kurniawan. Mella wrote: “(...)Around the time of the last general election under Suharto in 1997, there was the rumor that no gathering of more than five people would be allowed. We were curating the ‘Slot in the Box’ exhibition; Harsono presented his performance work Victim/Destruction I. Some intelligence agents came to inspect the exhibition; fortunately, they were not able to ‘read’ such works as the one that Agung Kurniawan made, i.e. the Holy Family.”[1]

After the tense period of the Reformation, Agung Kurniawan’s shrewd insight and provocative stance persist. This time, he was not merely pointing at the social and political power with regard to the state/the government, but also at the issue of power within the realm of art. His shrewd perception was directed at a particular group within the Indonesian middle class, i.e. the artists themselves, whose works started to be treated as commodities, and whom several curators and art institutions (of the “West” or the developed countries) at the time considered as the real manifestation of the social-cultural-political struggles of the “third world”. Agung Kurniawan expressed these stance and concepts in his work, Souvenirs from the Third World (1997-1999).[2]

Subsequently, a decade later when Jogja Biennale X (2009) was held, Agung Kurniawan presented a performance project that he called One Minute Mute, involving hundreds of people and taking place only briefly—a mere minute—in  a crowded area by the main road near the Central Post Office, Yogyakarta. Agung asked hundreds of people to simultaneously lie still on the pavement for a minute. This is thus a “street demonstration” à la Agung Kurniawan, to remind people of the sheer number of fatalities in various traffic accidents on the roads of Indonesian big cities—an issue that the society as well as the State should actually take seriously.

The above-mentioned works by Agung Kurniawan lead me to state that Agung’s works almost invariably contain elements that exist beyond the realm of representation, entering into the realm of experimentations and actions, especially as the works start to make a presence in the public space and interact with it. This issue will also come to the fore and is worth considering in his solo show that we are seeing today.

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Although Agung Kurniawan has not been holding solo exhibitions in Indonesia, he in fact is still actively working and taking part in a variety of art events in Indonesia and abroad. Also, if you often come to Yogyakarta and stop by at Kedai Kebun—a restaurant and exhibition space that the couple Agung and Neni manages together—you are bound to see Agung busily making sketches of future work or drawings (if he is not engaged in a “soccer game” on his PlayStation, that is).

After his solo show at Kendra Gallery, Bali, about a year ago, Agung has been busy again with his art, creating a series of works that you can see today at this exhibition at umahseni, “Actus Contritionis, Images of Memory’s Shadows”. ‘Actus Contritionis’ or the ‘Act of Contrition’ refers to the Catholic liturgy in which people admit their mistakes and pray to God to forgive their sins. The act of contrition is an act that is based on recollections: the doers still remember what they have done. This is the fundamental premise for Agung Kurniawan’s latest series.

The works that you will see in this exhibition—all of them form a complex interlace between the materials, the technique and the content—will be presented in three different groups.

The first group (“The Private Space: Memories and Shadows”) consists of a series of works with figurative images that Agung presented with direct references to a number of his family pictures. The photographs have helped him to re-arrange his childhood memory of the experiences he had with his family at home. He has actually presented such works in his previous solo show, “The Lines that Remind Me of You” (Kendra Gallery, Bali, 2011).

The choice to present various images of memories by using lines made of iron trellis, which overlap with shadow lines that appear as light falls on the trellis, constitutes a poetic statement about memories: memories as unsteady, fragile and vague images, resembling shadows, but ones that will always entice us to return to them as they offer a path to fragments of past actualities; they are the rags that, albeit shabby, might still serve as a part of the complex interlace of someone’s self-identity in the present time.

In the second group (The Public Space: Images of Violence, Power and the Artists), the statement encounter some ethical-political tensions as memories start to operate in the public space where they are formed by images reproduced by the mass media. At the same time: a number of things are forgotten, gone from the public memory, as they are no longer reproduced in the public space. This is despite the fact that some issues of violence and social-political mistakes of the past eras might only be accepted and dealt with—to be assessed and mended—if today we have the ability to remember and then understand them with a critical stance. Here contrition and memory meet: those who forget must be reminded so they can repent and ask for forgiveness.

I believe Agung’s works in this group constitute a path for us to be engaged in a process of anamnesis, to receive knowledge and enlightenment from those that have been forgotten. Like Socrates, Agung perhaps believes in a kind of ‘ideal memory’ that resides within every person. If our memory about something is buried under so many other things that we forget it, we need smart and shrewd questions to help us gradually uncover and unearth our memories so that we can deal with the issues presented to us.

In the third group (Automaton: Machine, Drawing, Memory), Agung Kurniawan presents his new “drawing machines”. He has made such drawing machines for the exhibition “PAUSE: Automatic Drawing” at LAF (September 10 – November 17, 2011). Initially, the drawing machine served as the manifestation of Agung Kurniawan’s idea about drawing, which he considers as the most immediate aesthetic expressions and ones that  can be detached from the complex intentions and inclinations of the person who draws them.[3]

In the subsequent stages, Agung treats the drawing machines as an allusion for the various drawing “styles” of some Indonesian artists whom he considers as having a characteristic drawing quality. At this point, we witness again Agung Kurniawan’s cheekiness as he turns some actors in the social stage of the Indonesian art scene as players on a drama set according to his wishes. We can thus accept that, like the automaton in the film The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Agung Kurniawan’s drawing machines are also memory machines: after the automaton draws the memory that is contained within the complex arrangement of coils and springs in its body, there is a great possibility for a range of stories and secrets to be unveiled.

— Enin Supriyanto | Curator |

[1] Anecdotes, in 15 Years Cemeti Art House, Exploring Vacuum, Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, 2003, p. 4

[2] This interesting and intriguing exhibition was held by Cemeti Art Foundation (the current IVAA) in 1999-2002 and was taken to travel to various big cities: Yogyakarta, Jakarta (in Indonesia); Hiroshima and Hokkaido (Japan); Canberra, Sydney, Cairns, Wollongong (Australia); Amsterdan (the Netherlands); Aachen, Köln, Berlin (Germany).

[3]In his introduction for the exhibition of “PAUSE: Automatic Drawing”, Agung reaffirms his conviction that drawing has a very special place in the practice of art, because there is the ‘automatic’ and fluid quality of drawing, and because anyone can do it, be it a little child or a senior artist.

In other words, Agung is of the opinon that drawings can always appear “automatically”. He then created the “automatons”, drawing machines that are able to draw automatically.