After starting at November 2008, the International Art Event tittled Jakarta Biennale XIII will end at this month. The event itself a series of " event " and " exhibition " at several places in Jakarta. Each of category divided into three zone : Zone of Understanding, The Battle Zone and The Fluid Zone.
Many international performers are participated in this event. Mostly from South East Asia. But Australia and Germany also sent their artists.
HISTORY OF BIENNALE ( from the official website )
The Jakarta Biennale is an art exhibition held every two years. It was titled before as the Indonesian Painting Grand Exhibition, held since 1968. In 1982, the title of Fine Art Biennale was introduced.
The Biennale is held as a responsibility sign of the artists to the society and is aim for the enhancement of appreciation toward art.
Jakarta Biennale is organized by The Jakarta Art Council and The Governor of Jakarta as the patron. Jakarta Biennale 09 is the first of its international character that invites outstanding artists from abroad.
JAKARTA BIENNALE 2009 ARENA ( visit also the Jakarta Art Council Website )
Jakarta, a city that covers an area of 661 square kilometers with 11.5 million inhabitants, continues to develop rapidly as a very crowded urban city. Like other urban cities, Jakarta also suffers from the loss of its social functions, which in this case is about the loss of the potentials of its citizens as social creatures. This happens due to various but interconnecting reasons, as well as to other factors such as the economic, social and political conditions.
The city’s spatial development has been focusing more on the economical and physical aspects rather than on the social or individual aspects. The individuals in the city’s structure are seen more as the object of the system. With all the flaws in the urban system, individuals in the society are currently in a battle field to fight for space, both the economic and the physical space.
Everything has been set aside to gain economic growth, without adequate attention toward the cultural aspects. This leads to the lack of public and cultural spaces where the society can identify themselves as social creatures, instead of as machines or alienated human beings. It is a difficult thing for us to secure a certain space that can serve as the place to mediate cultural discourses. All aspects of urban life have been dominated by the industrial, commercial spaces, and obviously by authority-dominated spaces.
Jakarta Biennale 2009 (JB 09) ,as an extensive celebration of art, will serve as an attempt to turn art into a reform strategy, engaging the urban subjects, enabling the reflective, critical, and creative ideas to give rise to new spaces that can be more inspiring, participative, and tolerant.
Zone of Understanding
JB 09 will begin by re-introducing what ARENA actually means; opened with a set of exhibitions and simple activities to raise the people’s awareness about what is going on in the society. This is because the society themselves often do not realize that their rights have been taken away—which can be in the form of personal views that are disturbed by the billboards on streets, or unasked-for advertisement messages on our mobile phones.
Public playgrounds, with the encircling iron fences for cleanliness reasons, turn into empty grounds, which are then considered to have no practical functions and finally demolished as the managers consider them to be a burden. Shopping centers, equipped with children’s amusement parks, were originally meant to facilitate the public to fulfill their household needs, but they have turned into consumptive areas, dominating family’s lives with financial demands.
The forms of exhibition in this phase are “one-sided”, presenting relatively classic murals, talk shows, and the likes. These series of early activities will try to raise our awareness about current issues.
Battle Zone
This program consists of a series of workshops and exhibitions that involve many cross-discipline practitioners to review the context of the contemporary spaces in Jakarta and to create new spaces for the public. This entails not only new spaces in its physical term, but also spaces for ideas that relate to many things which might affect the city’s development, such as the technology, economy, politics, history, and the public. The documentation of the project and workshop’s artifacts (outdoor billboards and on-site specific projects) will be displayed in the Fluid Zone section.
This zone focuses on the creation of spaces that facilitate and mediate new ideas in physical and mental terms, to create encounters and public spaces, so that the art, artists, and the public can interact and appreciate one another.
Artworks existing in a certain public space with the special characteristic of the site—spatially, socially, historically, publicly, and politically—become the most important elements. Works in the public space interact directly with unselected audiences: the audience can interact with the works and appreciate them without any distance. The public turns into active participants, becoming neither distant nor passive.
Art activities that are based on problems in the community and urban milieu in Jakarta become an important thing to be used as a starting point.
Art and technology and their relation and impact in society will be the focus of discussion in all activities. We bring out this focus of discussion because the development of technology in these years has been affecting our point of view in seeing “the reality”. Audio-visual media offers us new realities and “truth” that are increasingly more attractive and impressive. Furthermore, this leads to a new reality that can change the social condition. Other themes that we will present are: the phenomenon of community radio and television, the development of computers and games technology, and the virtual reality.
Series of exhibition, the workshop emphasizes on the effort to create new creativity rooms, by artists, community, or collaboration of both, in which the artists play the role as the guides that control the media.
Fluid Zone
International Fine Art Exhibition
Started from the town, to the district, and the country. Should the two previous stages focused on works regarding town, this stage would be wider.
In this phase, our curator Agung Hujatnikajennong tells us again that actually the overlapping processes in various cultures and interests have taken place since a long time ago in the city, country, and geopolitical area where we live, especially after the concepts of “nation-state” and modern cities were applied by post-colonial society. The word ‘Fluid’, which has the negative meaning of being weak when one culture another, yet it positively has the meaning of having the ability to absorb various culture that form a synthesize culture at each country in this region.
In the current time frame, the curator presents two approaches in the theme of the Fluid Zone. This exhibition consists of two sections, i.e. Traffic and On the Map. “On the Map” section will present Southeast Asian young artists whose reputations have been nationally and internationally acknowledged. This section will exhibit art works that represent contemporary problems that the Southeast Asia communities face nowadays, particularly the problems of cities, identities, geopolitical area, and room to maneuver.
The “Traffic” section will present international artists who had been resident artists or visiting artists to the Southeast Asian countries, whose works represent specific viewpoints on the Southeast Asian cultures and societies. This exhibition, basically, wants to invite us to think critically and creatively, and furthermore serves as a warning and perhaps provides answers to existing problems.
I also included an article from the Jakarta Post by Ary Hermawan regarding this event :
According to Ade Darmawan, the program director of Jakarta Biennale 2009, every public space in the capital is like an arena, an open area inside a Roman amphitheater where gladiators battle for their lives.
The city's public spaces, he explained, are never free from conflicting interests.
Greenbelts have been turned into parking lots to serve the city's growing number of private vehicles -- many of which are insanely expensive and luxurious -- amid concerns of deteriorating air quality and acute traffic congestion problem.
Sidewalks have persistently been used by street vendors to earn their daily incomes due to uncontrollable urbanization, resulting in recurring evictions, which epitomize the conflict between individuals and the state.
Meanwhile, the bright sky has mostly been covered by tall buildings and wide billboards. We have, as you might seldom realize, been eerily invaded by advertising billboards, the foremost cultural products of capitalism.
"As a source of reflection and inspiration," Ade said, "art is expected to be able to help address that problem."
The Jakarta Biennale 2009 highlights the issue of public space. Titled ARENA, the art event will for the first time since 1968 get out of art galleries and display high quality works of art in public places such as shopping malls, bus stops and parks.
"Thousands of people attend a shopping mall everyday," the event's communication manager, Ukke R. Kosasih, said.
Straying from the tradition of previous biennales, the 2009 biennale, which goes from November 2008 to March 2009, is not confined to visual arts. It consists of various kinds of event, including even film screenings and traditional music concerts.
Far from being elitist, the biennale's program includes a workshop on comic making for inmates at Tangerang's juvenile prison from Nov. 22 to Dec. 4. Their works will be exhibited at Senayan City from Feb. 1 to 7.
The aim is not to exhibit the city's artistic achievements, but to attract as much public attention as possible.
"The biennale is mostly funded by the city budget. We just think that we need to do something that benefits the public as taxpayers as well," Ade said. The cost of the five-month event is about Rp 3 billion (US$270,000).
The event is divided into three sub-thematic categories; zona pemahaman (comprehension zone), zona pertarungan (battle zone) and zona cair (melting zone).
Each zone is a gradual stage that will help the participating artists produce artworks relevant to the chosen theme, and the public to understand the artistic expression of urban problems.
The organizing committee has held workshops involving artists, architects and sociologists to determine the kinds of art to be displayed in public places in the "Specific Sites" and "Billboard" sections.
"We are still negotiating with the city's administration and billboard association to let some of their billboards be used for artistic activities," Ade said.
The billboard art exhibition, where people can view art like they view advertisements from their vehicles, has been postponed until early February 2009, from the initially planned Dec. 15. At the same time, an art exhibition titled "Jakarta 32" will be held at Atrium Senayan City.
The melting zone will begin on Jan. 6 with the opening of an international art exhibition at Galeri Nasional. It will be sidelined by a series of discussions featuring international speakers such as Yason Banal from the Philippines, Thomas Berghuis from Australia, Phil Collins from the UK and Donna Ong from Singapore.
"This will be the first international Jakarta Biennale," Ade said. -- Ary HermawanCheck for the schedule here.
and also here
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