Melati Suryodarmo
From top to bottom
All photos are courtesy of Melati Suryodarmo
“AMNESIA” - Performance Art, (2016), Photo Credit: Amnesia, performed at Ark Gallery Yogyakarta, 2016
“AMNESIA” - Performance Art, (2016), Photo Credit: Amnesia, performed at Ark Gallery Yogyakarta, 2016
“EXERGIE” – Butter dance, Performance Art, (2000)
Exergie – Butter dance is a performance work, which based on the human body’s recipients on its précised life-time, recognizing the danger and survival. Suryodarmo danced on a square block of butter placed in the middle of a black square. Accompanied by drum music, she moved, fell down, and got up again. The action is repeated. This is a long life project, that will be repeated in different time along the change of the age of the artist. The work was performed for the first time in 2000 at the Hebbel Theatre Berlin.
“I’m a Ghost In My Own House”
“If We Were XYZ “(Trilogy) - Performance Art, Video, Concept and performance: Melati Suryodarmo, Music: Jessika KenneyTechnologist and interactive systems design: Antonius Oki Wiriadjaja, (2019)
“If We Were XYZ “(Trilogy) - Performance Art, Video, (2019)
“Transaction of Hollows” - Performance Art, Transaction of Hollows, performed at Lilith Performance Studio, Malmø, Photo by Petter Petterson, (2016)
“YOUR OTHERNESS - I’VE NEVER BEEN SO EAST” - Dance Performance, Photo Credit: Your Otherness – I’ve never been so east, performed at the Witch Dance Festival, Sophien Sälle, Berlin, (2016)
Melati Suryodarmo (b. 1969)
Born in Solo, Melati Suryodarmo lives and works between her native Solo in Central Java, Germany and the wider world. She is Indonesia’s long durational performance artist par excellence using her body as a container of memories and experiences that with movements is her performance art. “The world that inspires me to move my thoughts is the world inside me,” she once told me. “The body becomes like a home which functions as a container of memories, a living organism. The system inside the psychological body that changes all the time has enriched my idea to develop new structures of attitude and thoughts.”
Originating in her personal experience of cultural bodies between the Western and the Eastern world, and infused with Buddhism, Animism and Islam, her over a hundred works are hybrid with syncretic undertones, evoking human nature in all its facets.
Born to an artistic couple immersed in dance and movement, she was taught to appreciate diverse cultural practices besides practicing Javanese culture. This included the practice of Tai chi in a combined form with Buddhist and Javanese elements. At the same time she learnt to practice diverse forms of meditation such as yoga in addition to the Javanese Sumarah, a local form of meditation that develops sensitivity and acceptance through deep relaxation of the body, emotions and mind, with notions of surrender.
Living between the cultures of the East and the West where she lived for twenty years, Melati’s work has felt the impact of elements of both worlds. She acknowledges the great influences of her tutors, the renowned Butoh dancer and teacher Anzu Furukawa and the long durational performance artist Marina Abramovic, as well as inspiration drawn from the iconic Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta and the German performance artist Boris Nieslony. But it is with her inborn tendency for myth and her own traditional culture that she has created her own authentic performances evoking a new meaning to the understanding of contemporary performance art.
Myths and traditional culture mix to become a powerful source of inspiration for works that fascinate and evoke a spirit that may present itself as alien, surreal and yet firmly related to contemporary culture. In this sense, Melati’s continuous research into the traditional has resulted in elements in her works that are rooted in that culture, time and place, but also revisited with the spirit of the contemporary.
One of her bold breakthroughs in the Indonesian art world was when as artistic director of the Jakarta Biennale 2017 she brought in Bissu, the androgynous shamans from South Sulawesi, to perform prayers and blessings at the opening night (Fig. 4). The biennale was themed Jiwa, a concept that is almost impossible to translate into English, however for the occasion it could be approached as an all-encompassing creative energy that flows from the past – or the memory of it – to the present, and onwards toward future visions. As the artistic director she boldly underlined a new understanding of contemporary practice by including the Bissu in the contemporaneity of the Jakarta Biennale. On 28 February 2020 her first solo exhibition of her 20 years practice opened at Museum Macan in Jakarta, featuring part live, part documentary of 12 selected long durational performance pieces that range from 3 to 12 hours. Among these were the most popularExergie-Butter Danceand I Am A Ghost in My Own House through which she challenges her own body physically and psychologically in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the self.
Melati is trying to share her experience, knowledge and network with cross-cultural artists and cross national art institutions at Padepokan Lemah Putih and Studio Plesungan in Solo where she has organized an Annual Performance Art Laboratory since 2007.
Acknowledging the changing patterns of culture in 2019 she embarked on a project that indicated an evolution of her usual practice with the ‘body as a container of memories and experiences.’ Now delving into the subconscious as inspiration, she devised a Sleep Laboratory that is able to measure a person’s brain waves during sleep. Through a complex process of sound recordings and brainwaves, and drawing upon elements of Javanese mysticism, each dream of herself and a few others, was able to be deciphered and, with added imaginative power, became the basis of a performance titled IF WE WERE XYZ (performed at Asia Society in New York). She was supported by Technologist Antonius Oki Wiriadjaja to decipher the data in the laboratory and invited Jessika Kenney to perform the dream notations together with her.
Her works are part of various exhibitions, among others, Re-enacting History: Collective Actions and Everyday Gestures (2017), National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Gwacheon, South Korea; SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2017), National Art Centre Tokyo & Mori Art Museum, travelled to Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan; AFTERWORK (2016), Para Site, Hong Kong, travelled to (2017) Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; East Asia Feminism: FANTasia (2015), Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; 8th Asia Pacific Triennale (2015), Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland, Australia; 5th Guangzhou Triennale (2015), Guangzhou, China; The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia (2014), Arter, Istanbul, Turkey; Medium at Large (2014), Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; Luminato Festival (2012), Toronto, Canada; Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia (2011), National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia; Marina Abramović Presents… (2009), Manchester International Festival, Manchester, U.K.; Incheon Women Artists Biennale (2009), Incheon, South Korea; Manifesta 7 (2008), Bolzano, Italy; Wind from the East: Perspectives on Asian Contemporary Art (2007), Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland.
CB 20 Feb 2022