=Sarong - Identity? Teguh Ostenrik's Solo Exhibition

Time Tomorrow at 7:00pm - November 20 at 10:00pm
Location Exhibition Hall - Jakarta Art District, East Mall Grand Indonesia Shopping Town
Created By 
Mira Tedja, Teguh Ostenrik
More Info Galeri Semarang cordially invite you to 
Teguh Ostenrik's Solo Exhibiton

sarong
identity ?

Curated by Jean Couteau

Opening Reception: 
Saturday, 6 November 2010, 7.00 pm
to be officiated by Hadi Sunyoto
Host : Brian Yaputra and Rayya Makarim 

SARONG - IDENTITY? , curated by Jean Couteau, presents a set of paintings and sculptures whose general theme, the “sarong”, he says was chosen as a medium of social criticism against a certain mode of religious practice in Indonesia. Yet, at a deeper level. insists Jean, “There is a golden thread that runs throughout the artist’s creativity: the fleeting field of human experience, and a synthesizing, sometimes essentialist manner in expressing it: primal masks, bare contours, color waves, sparkling lights, in short, essential forms or essential humanity.” 

Jean Couteau, who has also written books on Srihadi Sudarsono, Affandi and many other painters, considers 60 year-old and Solo-born Teguh as a rarity in the Indonesian art world. “Teguh, he says, launches in this exhibition a systematic attack against people’s obsession with identity and the discourses that accompany it. He uses the theme of the sarong to convey his message. “What does one see in Teguh’s sarong-cum-body paintings and sculptures? Visually, they consist of earth-colored figures of men and women, bowing and leaning in a variety of postures. Either wrapping, or on the contrary, unwrapping, colorless cloths around their bodies. The cloth at times sticks to the skin, and otherwise is kept, as if floating, at a distance. As for the body, nothing is special about it. It is not the physical body Teguh is trying to expose. Concerns for beauty, in the Greek Platonic sense attached to the word, is absent.

The bodies represent people engaged in a dialogue with the sarong, or rather, with what the sarong represents. What might this dialogue refer to, if not the problematic of body and culture, the way culture proposes and compels its norms on individuals, and the way these individuals accept or refuse those constraints.” Thus Teguh raises the of the “social construction of the body.” And related to that, the issue of the “social construction of norms of clothing” and consequently, of the whole value system. By doing so, he also raises the issue of power and freedom, “ explains Jean. 

Teguh, who had his last exhibition covered by Time Magazine, explains that to him the sarong is a field of creativity that reflects personal experiences as well as a variety of social discourses he has been subjected to. The personal and the public clash around the sarong. Teguh does not believe in identity, which is to him a sarong, or a set of sarongs, which one wears and casts aside at will. Likewise, to Teguh, style and theme are like sarongs one puts and discards. 

This exhibition is dedicated to the silenced ones.