The buoyant counterweight of a paper trail

ARTS

The Buoyant Counterweight of a Paper Trail A solo exhibition by Prilla Tania at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space is on till May 11, 2013.

thing without giving it a second thought? Take our daily use of paper. We scribble a note on pieces of paper—a note to our future self or to a loved one, a shopping list, a website address or phone number, a sketch while making a call—and then it ends up in the waste bin. We pay with banknotes for our groceries at the local market, and our groceries are packed in paper bags. We read the news in the papers.

Yesterday’s news is used to wrap up something temporarily. Using a bit more consideration, artists use paper to create drawings and etchings.

Prilla Tania’s current solo exhibition, “E” at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space in Bandung, draws upon both of these ruminations: she has created paper-based artworks by re-using paper to draw attention upon how inattentive we are regarding the stuff that surrounds us in our everyday lives. And she does so with stoic wit. She re-uses paper

60 |

| MAY 5, 2013

Prilla Tania and her “E” exhibition.

from previous art projects and from the products we can buy at the supermarket for our household needs. Instead of drawing or etching on the paper, Prilla cut them up into various shapes and forms to evoke her green concerns—though, with a subdued wittiness.

Prilla Tania is a graduate from the sculpture studio at Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB)’s art school (2001). Resin, never mind marble, the material sculptors often use, seemed too stiff and heavy for her liking. Since graduating, she ventured into different directions concerning techniques, materials and the media she uses: instal-

lation, video, performance, photography, paper-cuttings, patchwork, soft sculpture, shadow-play, drawing, among others. Intermingled with these, of course, have been all manner of overlaps: video performances and site-specific video installations, were some that she tried. After graduation, Prilla has exhibited at home and abroad, and has taken part in quite a few residencies.

Residencies are fruitful periods for this multi-media artist. Her most recent residency was at Heden (Dutch for ‘at present’) in the Netherlands in 2012, which she concluded with the exhibition De Chloroman. Chloroman is a man who does not eat; he does

PHOTO: SELASAR SUNARYO ART SPACE

H

OW often do we use some-

not need to because he has skin of chlorophyll, the green pigment that absorbs light and turns it into energy. For the De Chloroman exhibition, Prilla worked with paper cuttings. The leftover paper of this exhibition was used to create the works for “E”. In this way, “E” is the conclusion of the residency in Holland, as well as her way of using the gallery as a temporary studio space to create site-specific artworks.

The advantage of her mode of working is that she can set up studio any time and anywhere. Paper is a material easy to come by and it is not fragile unlike, say, ceramics, and thus is easy to transport. The material

also only requires a few blades and a pair of scissors. For three months Prilla set up her home away from home (which is nearby, anyway) to work on “E”, which stands for ‘energy’—or the disrupted current of it, for which she had sensitized her ears and eyes towards.

How to allow art to deal with the unintended consequences of modernization, industrialization and urbanization? Dealing with a question this big could be a slippery slope for an artist, and could also mount to nothing more than moralist sloganism. But this is not the case in the body of work presented by Prilla; her approach is very personal,

showing an intimacy between herself as the artist and her chosen material, technique, tools and media, resulting in artworks and ultimately in the exhibition (thus creating a body within a body, as she calls it).

Prilla’s work in “E” looks simple, though one realizes that to make art look simple is hard work. She meticulously cut the paper into a wide variety of forms and shapes. She photographed each piece and turned the photographs into stop-motion videos. Afterwards, she mounted each work onto the walls using paper-based tape and pins. She re-used paper so as not to add to the cycle of waste. The resultant “E” walks a tight rope between lightness and heaviness: the lightness of materials and media used, and the ponderousness of the exhibition’s theme.

In the first gallery space—Ruang Sayap (or: Wing Gallery)—Prilla shows the works she titled Daur Energi (The Cycle of Energy) and Voluntarily Dictated. The first work is a considerably large collage of paper cuttings from cardboard food packaging and a stopmotion video. After cutting out the shapes, Prilla had turned the cardboard around— she uses color sparingly—and mounted them to the wall; taken together, especially seen in tandem with the video, we immediately sense her concern with the waste of energy in the food production, distribution and consumption process. The second work is a paper mural showing the front sides of re-used packaging, particularly the sections showing the nutrition values of the boxes’ contents. Both pieces work magically in this space, the only minus being the visually too-dominant wall text.

In the second space—Gallery B—the following works are presented: Larung (Offering), which uses unused paper from her De Chloroman project; “O”, which is a stopmotion video made of paper cut-outs portraying a sustainable utopia; and Awal (Beginning), which is a poetic play on shadows with paper cuttings placed before lights on the floor. The only piece that did not quite work for me was Larung, which took away some of the flow of the otherwise excellent exhibition. But may be this was also caused by the noisy racket flowing in from the videos playing in adjacent rooms.

All in all, “E” is a great exhibition. And Chabib Duta Hapsoro has made an excellent debut as head curator of Selasar Sunaryo Art Space after Agung Hujatnikajennong stepped down recently. A possible future Prilla Tania project will be the use of organic paper she plans to produce from fibers of the Saeh tree growing in her garden. ● ROY VORAGEN (BANDUNG-BASED ART WRITER)

MAY 5, 2013 |

| 61