DANDANG CHRISTANTO | LOST
7 FEBRUARY - 4 MARCH 2018
The Nancy Sever Gallery was pleased to launch its 2018 program with an exhibition of recent work by Dadang Christanto, one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.
Dadang Christanto was born and educated in Indonesia but has lived in Australia since 1999. He has exhibited in Tokyo, New York, Havana, Bangkok, Venice, Sao Paulo, Osaka, Jakarta and Kwangju (Korea) as well as in cities in Australia and New Zealand. He has been artist-in-residence at the University of South Australia, Monash University, the Australian National University, the Ecole cantonale de l’Art du Valais in Switzerland, the Manukau School of Arts in Auckland and Western Front in Vancouver. He has been a lecturer at the School of Art and Design at the University of the Northern Territory in Darwin and has lectured at the College of Fine Arts at the University of NSW. He is now an independent artist living on the Northern Rivers NSW. His art works are held in major public collections in Australia and overseas.
Dadang Christanto has been a human rights activist and an artist of conscience since his early years at the College of Arts at Yogyakarta, working with organisations committed to social justice. In the 1980s he was associated with the Indonesian New Art Movement of young artists who, at great personal risk, challenged the existing political establishment.
Through his painting, drawing, performance, sculpture and installation he explores the nexus between power and violence, speaking eloquently and empathetically for the victims of political repression and social injustice and those who have been persecuted because of political identity or ethnicity. His work is a criticism of systemic, state sponsored violence wherever it occurs and it challenges the silence, voluntary or enforced, of all those who stand by as onlookers. It fills a void created by an almost total lack of non-official or documentary evidence of such events. It continues to demonstrate the subversive power of art and its ability to generate public awareness of that which military regimes are trying to supress.
In this exhibition, Dadang Christanto focuses on the issue of heritage and critical collective memory on traditional knowledge, called pawukon (wuku), that has been lost. The work is a reflection, a deep meditation on the Javanese calendar and its "future prediction." This tradition, along with many other important events that are also no longer recognized, seems to have sunk into the depths of the ocean, erased by the wave of a new kind of modern belief system. In making The Wuku, Dadang was also in conversation and collaboration with artisans in Yogyakarta.
Dadang Christanto | Lost opened at the Nancy Sever Gallery on Wednesday 7 February 2018 and run until 4 March 2018. For further information please contact Nancy Sever at nancy.sever@iinet.com.au Mob. 0416 249 102. The Gallery is open Wednesday – Sunday 11 am – 5 pm. Gorman Arts Centre, Corner of Batman and Currong Sts. Braddon. ACT 2612
Artworks included in the exhibition:
(for details of the works, please click and hold cursor over the image)
Please click here to view Images of the opening and performance, courtesy of Andrew Sikorski, photography@art-atelier.com.a