Looking Here Looking North

A poetic counterpoint to Gillman’s video is Sofiyah Ruqayah’s two-panel watercolor collage Whatever Makes You Cold Freezes Me (2018), inspired by the artist’s childhood memories of visiting the tomb of her ancestor Mbahrajapadumi in West Java. Ruqayah’s serpentine forms speak of lineage, bloodlines, congealed veins, and synapses, while the mottled texture evokes the corporeality of marked skin. Yet the medium of watercolor also embodies fluidity, mutability and ephemerality, representing the ever-changing nature of our own mnemonic identity and body. Ruqayah’s work serves as a microcosm for the multilayered exhibition itself: while bound by a study of diaspora, it also eludes it. 

Similarly, Mashara Wachjudy’s work Konstruksi (2018), featuring collaged Google Street View images rebuilding the contours of her family kampong (village) in Bandung, printed onto banners and draped over bamboo structures, may be analyzed under the diasporic lens of displacement, loss, and the fabrication of imaginary homelands. At the same time, it invokes the human impulse to reconstruct and reimagine within the matrix of the digital age. Hence, Wachjudy’s work may be located in the interstice between the public arena of internet archives and personal spheres of place. Ida Lawrence’s three canvases—Dimas’s Wifi Tower (2018), Customs (2018), and On Patriotism (2018)—also employ techniques of de- and reconstruction to create palimpsests of diaristic observations. Lawrence recalls in both English and Bahasa Indonesian “the scorching afternoon sun as we walked between relatives’ houses” and the way the “stars twinkle and fireflies dance in the rice fields” in her handwritten anecdotes, presented within murky, overlapping depths of paint. Spelling errors and edits are made visible in the texts, commenting on the inevitable slippage in translation between languages. 

Kartika Suharto-Martin’s video installation Siti Suharti (2018) problematizes national mythologies by reworking keroncong songs, a popular music genre in Java characterized by its retro-nationalism. In full traditional costume, Suharto-Martin lip-syncs in the Australian bushland, inserting herself into the Australian landscape amongst shots of lorikeets and eucalyptus trees, establishing a third space for Javanese diaspora. However, the performativity seen in her use of slow-motion, lip-sync and close-up shots suggests an ambivalence that combats reductive national meta-narratives and extrapolates instead on the performativity of identity more broadly.  

Alfira O’Sullivan’s video and installation Weekends Are for Washing (2018), encapsulates the nuance of the exhibition. In her video, O’Sullivan washes her Indonesian dance clothes in a sink with one hand while holding her baby in the other, representing her roles as both mother and dancer. Meanwhile, in the middle of the space, Indonesian dance costumes are hung on a Hills Hoist—a clothesline that has become an iconic fixture of Australian suburban life—representing O’Sullivan’s dual cultural identities. By presenting herself in these roles, O’Sullivan complicates the dualism of here and there, either Indonesian or Australian.