242
243
Sakshi Gupta spirit of cinema as a social activity that can be organized independently anywhere. Ruangrupa, is an artists’ initiative and nonprofit organization established in the beginning of year 2000 by a group of artists from Jakarta. Ruangrupa focuses on the promotion of art through research, study and documentation. Ruangrupa works extensively with artists through exhibitions, artist in residence programs, art projects and workshops. It cooperates with many artists in a horizontal structure to support and mediate fresh ideas of visual art as a cultural activity relating with social and cultural discourse, with particular relevance to Indonesian contemporary culture.
146
“Reality Bites” was made at an artist residency at Kashi Art Gallery in Kochi, Kerala in 2006. Dealing, on the one hand, with the confrontations and negotiations with the world at large, the work explores an individual grappling with day-to-day situations and with the people one is closest in contact with. The work tries to place the self in the midst of these elements, that one takes so much for granted as sources of comfort, for often they are the most testing – at times making one overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, at other times leading the self to a dreamlike vacuum and sometimes showing us the rare glimpses of who we really are. Streets in Kochi replete with red chillies, the ubiquitous Chinese fishing nets in the sea and faced with the ire of the mosquitoes helped me arrive at this site-specific representation of this complex, at once universal and individual, matrix of emotions. Sakshi Gupta (born 1979) is a sculptor based in New Delhi. Re-engendering discarded scrap to make works where the material transcends
Setu Legi it’s mundane, often industrial origins, her work looks at the contradictions inherent in day-to-day living. The environment and space in which they are created become forces that have a deliberate impact on the work as it develops through improvisation. In bringing together real with potential, lasting with ephemeral, solitude with chaos, her work searches for ways to find an intellectual and emotional equilibrium. In 2011 Sakshi was awarded the Civetella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and in 2007 she received the Inlaks International Scholarship
148
An idol can be identified as a thing that resembles a living creature or a dead object. It is worshipped and believed to exercise influence upon life close to itself. This is how idols have been understood in Abrahamic religions, specifically Islam. For more than 14 centuries, idols have been seen as evil entities to be warded off and destroyed. In recent times, their existence has become irrelevant.
Sheba Chhachhi idols connote concepts and ways of thinking that embody ethics and social status within the frame of capital and opportunities for domination.
Aside from idolatry, this work also presents contradictions taking place as the establishment of prayer houses is becoming excessive, consuming land and the environment. Setu Legi criticizes the excessive establishment of prayer houses beyond necessity, and how establishing them has been an existentialist Only the historical remains of good and evil still resonate as time goes by. Within a modern effort for people. What was previously abstract has been materialized. context, idols connote concepts and ways of thinking that worship ethics and social status within the framework of capitalism and exploitation. Setu Legi’s work explores the social Setu Legi was born in Yogyakarta and was raised in a family of teachers and traditional problems created in this modern framework merchants. He finished his study in the faculty linked to morality and trust. of Fine Art and Design, Indonesian Art Institute (ISI) Yogyakarta in 2000. During Setu Legi’s work is an installation featuring five objects referred to as new idols of religious the 1998 political turmoil in Indonesia he founded Taring Padi, an art and cultural compractice; something outside the essence of munity, with his friends. This community has religion itself. He installs objects that are been an estuary for creative interaction and usually found in a house of worship, specifically a mosque, for example loudspeakers and critical engagement with sociopolitical development in Indonesian cultural spaces. symbols found on the roofs of mosques, bricks and trees. Within today’s context,
150
Ganga’s Daughters, Photo-video installation, 2005 Not one not two not three or four, but through 84 00000 vaginas have I come, guzzled on pleasure and on pain. AkkaMahadevi ,From“Speaking of Siva”, translated by AK Ramanujan. 12thC Eleven women confront the viewer and acknowledge their collaboration in the construction of their representations. The gaze is direct; postures deliberate, reminiscent of genres of self-presentation in bazaar studio photography. These are transgressive women, not wives, mothers or daughters but women who have dared to re- invent themselves in relation to the metaphysical.Though contained within seemingly traditional subcultures, their actions and bodily transformations chafe against easily codified definitions of such usually ethnographic subjects.Here, each woman offers an avant-garde performance of self, subverting conventional assumptions about gender, sexuality, domesticity and female piety.