EXHIBITION FOOTNOTES

Jumaadi’s project is an interdiscplinary exploration in mixed-media of cross-cultural experience. Informed by Indonesian oral and visual folkloric traditions and modernist avante-garde aesthetics, the project engages with contemporary identity politics in which the individual, the family, the village, communal memory and the environment are interwoven with larger issues of national identity, post-colonialism and globalisation. Jumaadi’s ’audience with himself’ is an autobiographical expression of longing and belonging that documents his memory of his Javanese village in order to offer evidence of what has changed, and what has not, within himself and the world. Combining Indonesian and Australian iconography, Jumaadi has developed a highly idiosyncratic visual language of symbols, myths and metaphors, familiar and yet foreign, the apparent simplicity of which discloses a complex narrative rich in suggestion that communicates with layered meanings the ecological, political, social and aesthetic changes he has experienced.

Cerita. Drawing on Paper

Jumaadi is a 36 year old painter, poet and performance artist from the Javanese village of Pecantingan. In the years before his emigration to Australia he had been a very active participant in the cultural life of the area. He wrote complex poetic narratives for theatre and performance groups and developed skills as a grass puppet-maker in order to enrich the telling of these narratives. Painting, in the western sense of a contained representation, was not, at that time, a major factor in his creative output.

Jumaadi settled in Sydney in 1998 and began studying Fine Art. He has completed his Master of Fine Arts (in painting) at the National Art School. He maintains close links with Indonesia and makes frequent visits to his family and village. Pecantingan is only 10km from the edge of the mud spill that in May 2006 swallowed about twelve villages after a mining incident that left 12,000 people homeless. This disaster, and the 2004 tsunami, prompted many questions for Jumaadi, leading him to wonder about the nature of creation and destruction, death, love and hope, in relation to his homeland. To document his feelings and express his emotions he produced a series of small drawings and watercolours of the bodies of pregnant women floating on water. Impromptu and automatist in character, Jumaadi’s working method is fast and informal, a spontaneous creative energy from the subconscious that manifests in imagery imbued with such powerful symbolism and semiotic complexity that it is able to operate on a variety of metaphorical levels.

The resultant layers of meaning within the work render his particular vision, although personal and idiosyncratic, with a universal significance. A desire to embrace and preserve his memories of his village and its folkloric traditions thus motivates Jumaadi’s project, and his efforts to articulate his personal experience from the point of view of an artist working between cultures endows his project with a freshness and originality that reinvigorates the notion of research within an academic visual arts context. Indeed, it is a project that resists easy classification.

On the one hand, his project deals with the particular minutiae of local Javanese creative activity, of stories, poems and social interaction, and on the other with wider issues of globalisation and the dominance of western cultural practice and discourse. His project is thus located within a local Indonesian artistic tradition as well as within the contemporary context of displacement, dislocation and cultural identity that is the preocupation of much recent visual arts practice. At the same time, Jumaadi identifies with Australian Indigenous painters, such as Ian Abdullah, whose preoccupation with country evokes a sense of place that is at once personal, communal, spiritual and ecological in its concern with the past and the social and environmental threats of the future. Jumaadi addresses and elaborates upon these issues, which establishes a context for a project that brings together such Indonesian artists as Sujoyono Kerton, Hendra Gunawan and Dadang Christianto with a diversity of Western influences that range from Chagall to Frida Kahlo; Utrillo to William Robinson; and from Clemente to McCahon.

The death of his father in 2007 has moved Jumaadi to record and preserve the stories of his village as told by his mother and friends. These stories provide the subject-matter of his drawings and paintings and have inspired his collaboration with poets and performace artists in Indonesia and Australia. Jumaadi’s work embodies the notion of discovery rather than conventional ideas of research. But although it is not merely an illustration of a concept, the work is grounded in an informed awareness of the issues that, in terms of research, are aligned with conventional notions of knowledge acquisition. Jumaadi’s methodology spans anthropological and ethnographic approaches to data collecting, such as interviews and conversations with the people of his village; the identification of particular symbols; and the performative interaction with his audience that draws on a variety of traditional oral, visual, and theatrical artforms and social practices.

Jatayu to the Rescue. Wayang Puppet Show based on the Ramayana.

Jumaadi’s desire to not only preserve the traditional practices of his region but enlist them in order to communicate with a wider audience is underpinned by his awareness of the social role of the artist. In these terms, his work is a kind of visual poetry in which each image cannot be separated from its context in relation to the whole, a pictorial strategy by which meaning is generated as a cumulative process of reading the images as a form of text. In its execution and apparent simplicity, the work almost contradicts the sophistication of its agenda. In this project the work truly is the embodiment of the research; the result of a consistent engagement with and a sustained investigation of a cluster of deeply resonant issues – an approach that negotiates that fine line between conscious research and intuitive ceativity that is the hallmark of all creative practices. It is a true example of reflective practice.

By:  Michael Downs, Dr Ian Greig and Bernard Ollis

Jumaadi is opening his first solo exhibition for 2010 Rain Rain Come Again and his 12th solo show to date at 6 pm tonight at Watters Gallery 109 Riley Street East Sydney.  It runs from 20 January - 6 February, 2010, with solo shows in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Indonesia to follow and several other group shows in Australia most notably Public Laundry.  He is co-artistic director of The Museum of Memory an ongoing project between Indonesian poets, musicians, composers and visual artist which raises awareness on the Lapindo Mud Disaster near his hometown in Java and the Carabaoist Collective in Australia which is currently working on various poly-media performances utilising a fusion of traditional & contemporary Asian aesthetic practices.

This post is tagged artist profile, australian contemporary art, bernard ollis, dadang christanto, heri dono, ian greig, indonesian contemporary art, jumaadi, lapindo mud disaster, michael downs, national art school, Painting, the carabaoist collective, the museum of memory, watters gallery