Titik Kumpul - Art Jakarta 2022

Project Manager
Text
Artistic Director

TITIK KUMPUL
In Search of One’s Orbital Path

ISA Art Gallery presents Titik Kumpul in marking the twelfth edition of Art Jakarta, featuring 18 artists whose works further the exploration of their “orbital path.”
 
The circle is a symbol used in the various fields of geometry, philosophy, art, sociology, biology, and religion. They often represent the notions of unity, integration, wholeness, and they give a sense of completion, confidence, and harmony. The circle represents a cycle of moving & working with no real beginning or end.
 
Completing a full circle is the act of creating or giving back, completing a cycle that breeds balance. Titik Kumpul is the place where one line meets another line. In other words, it is the completion a work cycle. Artists who use origins as a starting point explore one’s possibilities and returns to the starting point to evaluate its growth.
 
An orbital path encapsulates the artist’s journey summarized in a circle, a shape with no ends, and a repeating path suggesting a constant finding on one’s discovery or exploration. For instance, A. Sebastianus’ orbital path begins with his exploration of visual and material ontology, creating his final works of weaving, which has become an essential element in the artist’s oeuvre. The art of weaving circles back to his initial exploration of decontextualizing material culture and understanding how they are perceived and ritualized in practice.
 
One of Indonesia’s most influential and respected contemporary artists, Arahmaiani is known internationally since the 80s for her powerful and provocative commentaries on social, political, and cultural issues. She, who operates with a plethora of mediums, concerns highly with her surroundings, socially and environmentally. The birth of her concern for the environment and spiritual has led the artist to keep delving into Indonesia’s living domain, which can be seen repeatedly throughout her works, becoming a never-ending reminder to keep preserving Indonesia’s nature. Using the chosen vivid colours, Arahmaiani shares her pop aesthetic imagery in this exhibition.
 
The study of Indonesian Gamelan engrossed the American-born artist Aaron Kuffner. His artistic journey began as he immersed himself in Indonesian music culture. This led to his constant exploration of the process of making the instruments, cataloging various tuning modalities and developing his own electronic notation system, all of which was initialized since the beginning of his artistic journey. His work’s mission is to expand the legacy and creative cultural power of gamelan through innovation.
 
Inspired by timeless stone inscriptions, Bonggal Hutagalung’s notes his attempt to uncover and criticize the phenomenon of social and critical issues regarding the development of the art of this contemporary art period, which has become a perpetual exploration within his work. Bonggal represents points from various eras- both inside and outside the world of art in a pessimistic and realistic language by inserting social context into an object and blending it into a work of art.
 
The demonstration of balance is flawlessly captured in the work of Gabriel Aries. Playing with new materials in his artistic practice, Aries enables himself to create balance and harmony from two different materials of polyresin and acrylic sheets. He focuses on exploring the inclusion of new materials into his artistic practice that previously concentrated in stone carving. The composition of balance is repeatedly explored in his work.
 
Hadassah Emmerich is a multidisciplinary artist whose work touches upon her identity, whether from her female identity or her mixed heritage identity of Dutch, Indonesian, Chinese, and German. Describing herself as a female pop artist, Emmerich explores and investigates the notion of exoticism by using a bold visual vocabulary. The visually charged work perfectly captures the artist’s orbital path of discovering who she is as an artist and a person.
 
Drawing inspiration from the cardinal importance of light, Hannah Shin’s paintings combine a highly confident use of line, color, and balance, instilling an energetic and vibrant composition into the mind. This has been the key element in her work that goes full circle in her artistic process.
 
Classified as not a ‘pure’ photographer, Hardi Budi whisks together photography with an element of surrealism in capturing his life journey of imagination, emotion, and experiences. This was the starting point of his artistic path, which has become an infinite inspiration for the artist to create his works.
 
The Berlin-based visual artist, Ida Lawrence’s oeuvre is characterized by interpretations of everyday observations and details through a combination of painted text and imagery. For instance, Mimosa pudica (un-botanical illustration) 2022 disrupts the anthropomorphic associations given to a widely growing plant in Indonesia, putri malu (‘shy princess’) whose leaflets fold closed when touched or disturbed. The painting’s style rejects the traditions of botanical illustration, which aims to capture and classify nature as a tameable object in an idealized 'accurate' form, and instead shows the plant as a growing and wild subject, echoed in the composition’s asymmetry with all stages of the painting process left visible.
 
Ines Katamso is enamored by the ideas of life, an endless interest in the subject matter within her work. The discovery of life opens possibilities for the artist to explore her creative process. ‘Where does life begin?’ is an ongoing investigation for Katamso, leading her works to revolve around themes of Earths geology and biology. She always finds her way back to discovering something about life through her creation. To Katamso, fossils are amazing objects because they are temporal gates. Through the process of fossilization, extinct organisms somehow became immortal by becoming a part of Earth's geology. It was natural for her to include minerals in her practice by grinding stone, ocher, clay and turning them into paintings.
 
Jompet Kuswidananto, who works at the confluence of music and visual art, has yet stimulated his audience to a heightened sense of perception of Indonesian history. Inspired by the complexities of Indonesia’s history, he showcases his ongoing exploration of the cultural history of darkness in this exhibition. Kuswidananto loves to work with the contradictory faces of nostalgia through creating images of illuminated battle, beautified violence and glossy ruins.
 
Jumaadi’s signature style comprises rejecting the accustomed framing, often found in unusual shapes displaying rhythmic patterns. A pattern is a form of imitation and repetition, suggesting his perpetual finding of his fascination with nature.
 
The repetitive pattern seen in Marisa Ng.’s work is the use of gestural brush strokes is a reflection of her subconscious and spontaneous actions. It is seen throughout her works, emphasizing the balance of chaos and control. It is a repeated concept that she does in creating her works.
 
Miko Veldkamp’s artistic journey is derived from his personal experiences of living across different geographic locations, combining his memories with folklore and ancestral histories revolving around the themes of race, privilege, and historical relations between the United States, the Netherlands, Suriname, and the Asian Diaspora. Colours are an important element in Veldkamp’s work, moving like a liquid across canvases creating ambiguous fictional narratives between time and place set within fantastical scenes, reflecting Veldkamp’s personal experiences of living across different geographic locations.
 
Photographer Nico Dharmajungen juxtaposes the flora beauty with the naked female form as a metaphor of the sacred. His return to Indonesia in 1992 from Germany where he lived for 25 years, brought photography as a form of contemporary art to life, marking his significant contribution to the Indonesian art scene.
 
Best-known for her colorful large-scale public artworks and geometric paintings, Sinta Tantra’s work often encompasses her Balinese identity. Tantra’s orbital path is exhibited through her unique creation in multiple dimensions and scales. The bird of paradise may not be indigenous to Bali, but Tantra saw the beautiful creature as a metaphor for her own identity.

Tara Kasenda’s soft color palette offers a dichotomy of beauty and chaos, the defined and undefined, reality and dream, old and new, emphasizing the issue of identity, perception, and memory. The use of a soft color palette has been a reiteration within the grain of Kasenda’s work, demonstrating the artist’s orbital path.
 
Notions of femininity are the foundation of the Dublin-based figurative painter, Vannesa Jones’ artistic practice. Self-portraiture is employed to explore her own dual identity of Western and Eastern cultures. This exploration has become a loop in her practice, which then returns to the beginning of her artistic journey in evaluating her self-development.
 
Each artist comes from different places & has marked their exploration through creation, using origins as a foundation. Their origin acts as a starting point, in which they go out to explore their possibilities or one’s surroundings and return to the starting point to evaluate self-development.