PRESENTATION: Melati Suryodarmo-I am a Ghost in My Own House

Melati Suryodarmo, Sweet Dreams Sweet, 2013, Video documentation, one-channel HD, 17m16s. Courtesy of the Artist

Melati Suryodarmo is the eleventh winner of the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art (BACA) and presents “I am a Ghost in My Own House”, her first big solo exhibition in Europe and the Netherlands. Suryodarmo is a versatile artist, but is particularly known for her compelling performances. In her work, she interprets strong political and social insights in a poetic and physical visual idiom.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bonnefanten Archive

“I am a Ghost in My Own House” the title of the exhibition comes from Melati Suryodarmo’s performance of the same name, which lasts for twelve hours. In this performance, she grinds charcoal on a stone mortar for twelve hours, exhausting herself, while also drawing on the energy potential of the charcoal. Suryodarmo therefore sees the charcoal as symbolic of a life cycle that inevitably ends in death. For Suryodarmo, pulverising the charcoal symbolises her tiredness and physical exhaustion, which are coupled with her being uprooted and her return to Indonesia after living in Germany for many years. The works in the exhibition show the versatility of her artistry. Alongside performances, you also see video installations, photography and drawings. For her other work, Suryodarmo also takes inspiration from her lengthy performances, important elements of which are the focus on her body and the way she deals with or shapes time. She regards her body as an archive and a landscape, and as her connection to the world. Her body is her familiar place of refuge, which is a greater constant than any physical space whatsoever. Time is essential to her work and the experience of it, as it transforms the performer, the audience and the space. Through aspects of her work like duration, slowness, observation, introspection and interaction, she aims to transgress the short concentration span of our individual, passive consumerism. In “Transaction of Hollows” (2016), wielding a Javanese bow, Melati Suryodarmo shoots arrows in a room, where the audience is allowed in the space with her. We hear the sound of the arrows as they whizz through the air and pierce the walls with a hollow thud. Through this performance, the artist meditates on the direction of our lost society. To “aim” at something can be both literal and metaphorica — an archer aims for the bull’s eye on the target, just like people aim to achieve personal goals. The philosophy of Javanese archery teaches us that the process is as important as the outcome, an idea which Melati amplifies in this work, as she proposes a more direct relationship with the world around us, suggesting that dealing with the process of life should be a personal philosophy rather than aiming for socially imposed outcomes. The performance “Exergie – butter dance” (2012) was inspired by her interest about time, especially how the human body relates to its biological, psychological and physical time. The artist also believe that everything happens in this world does not stop, even when we die. What we can deal with is the time that our body can adjust to the whole conception of time, whether it is physical or biological. But she was seduced to enter the specific moment, a moment where her body relates with very specific delicate moment, just like before she falls down. This a moment where all her consciousness controls her body, but at the same time the risk comes unpredictable. She light lose the control, but the will to get up again is more important to her. It is about our attitude towards this very specific moment in life. As our perception on pain is produced within our education and cultural environment, Melati Suryodarmo believes that everybody percieves the action and images of this work in many different ways according to their individuals.  In the performance “Eins und Eins” (2017), the artist wears a black dress and white shoes, and holds a basin of black liquid which is the substitute of ink. She sips from the basin and spits out the ink. Her face becomes splattered with the black liquid. She groans deep gutteral sounds of despair. Eins und Eins is inspired by Melati’s comparison of a nation to a human body with functioning organs, where repressive conditions can result in the body holding onto aggression and unease before eventually physically purging these emotions in the form of nausea, vomit and excretion. The result is strangely aesthetic and can be seen to draw on histories of ink painting and especially calligraphy with its underlying relationship to language. In the same way, a nation consisting of hundreds of millions of oppressed people with restricted rights tends to produce a similarly explosive reaction in the form of a rebellion or revolution.

Melati Suryodarmo trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, in Germany. A chance encounter brought her into contact with the famous Anzu Furukawa, with whom she studied butoh (a Japanese theatre form that combines different disciplines and techniques, such as dance, performance and movement), following which she took classes in performance art with the renowned Marina Abramović. Suryodarmo’s performances reflect her own ideas and cultural background, and concern the relationship between the human body, the defining cultural traditions to which the body belongs and the context in which it lives. She focuses on concepts like home, spirituality, family and personal history, interweaving them with socio-political, activist and mainly feminist ideas. Partly as a result of politics and gender discrimination, her work has long gone unnoticed. Through her indefatigable efforts to forge connections between art and artists and society, Suryodarmo has become a key figure in the cultural world of Indonesia. Nowadays, her name is widely known and acknowledged in South-East Asia and elsewhere, yet unaccountably her work has not received a great number of international awards or solo exhibitions.

Photo: Melati Suryodarmo, Sweet Dreams Sweet, 2013, Video documentation, one-channel HD, 17m16s. Courtesy of the Artist

Info: Curator: Philippe Pirotte, Bonnefantenmuseum, Avenue Ceramique 250, KX Maastricht, The Netherlands, Duration: 12/6-30/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 11:00-17:00, www.bonnefanten.nl/

Melati Suryodarmo, I’M A GHOST IN MY OWN HOUSE, 2012 Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photoghrapher: Riki Zoelkarnain
Melati Suryodarmo, I’M A GHOST IN MY OWN HOUSE, 2012, Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photoghrapher: Riki Zoelkarnain

 

 

Melati Suryodarmo, TRANSACTION OF HOLLOWS, 2012 Performed at Lilith Performance Studio, Malmø,2012 Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Petter Petterson
Melati Suryodarmo, TRANSACTION OF HOLLOWS, 2012 Performed at Lilith Performance Studio, Malmø, 2012, Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Petter Petterson

 

 

Melati Suryodarmo, EXERGIE - butter dance, 2005 Performed at VideoBrasil, Sao Paolo, 2005. Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photoghrapher: I. Matthaeus
Melati Suryodarmo, EXERGIE – butter dance, 2005, Performed at VideoBrasil, Sao Paolo, 2005. Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photoghrapher: I. Matthaeus

 

 

Melati Suryodarmo, Eins und Eins, 2016 Performed at Pearl Lam Galleries Singapore, 2016. Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photoghrapher: Riki Zoelkarnain
Melati Suryodarmo, Eins und Eins, 2016, Performed at Pearl Lam Galleries Singapore, 2016. Photo Courtesy of the artist. Photoghrapher: Riki Zoelkarnain

 

 

Melati Suryodarmo, Membran, Lambda print op aluminium dibond. Courtesy of the artist
Melati Suryodarmo, Membran, Lambda print op aluminium dibond. Courtesy of the artist

 

 

Melati Suryodarmo, HEAD PIECE, 1997, Video in loop, one-channel S-VHS, digitalised, 1m38s. Courtesy of the Artist
Melati Suryodarmo, HEAD PIECE, 1997, Video in loop, one-channel S-VHS, digitalised, 1m38s. Courtesy of the Artist

 

 

Melati Suryodarmo, Limerence 3, 2018, Charcoal powder on handmade STPI paper. Courtesy of the artist & Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore
Melati Suryodarmo, Limerence 3, 2018, Charcoal powder on handmade STPI paper. Courtesy of the artist & Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore