스킵네비게이션

❑ artist bio

Kabul (real name: Budi Agung Kuswara) was born in 1982 in Indonesia. He has BA in Fine Arts from Indonesian Institute of the Art, Yogyakarta. Mintio was born in 1986 in Singapore. She has BA in Photography from Art Design & Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Both live and work in Singapore and Indonesia. This artist duo started the collaboration when they had the exhibition, The wax on our fingers (2013) in Yogyakarta. Since then, they have actively shown works including: Rain Diaries (2016), The Current/s We Call Home (2018), etc.

❑ introduction

Kabul have sought to find out how the arts have changed individual lives and how they can build community. As seen in his representative pieces, Nothing without you (2012) and The fire flies (2016), he takes paintings that he made in his youth as medium that allows him to explore his emotion, identity, and ideas on life. Recently, his practice has centered in collaborating with Rumah Berdaya, where he conduct Skizofriends Art Movement, a program combined art therapy and everyday rehabilitation training. Mintio, a photographer as well as the president of ‘Ketemu Project’ in Balley, Indonesia, have created works dealing with performative and reflective time-space where in which she incorporates layering images filmed with analog method and using painterly techniques. Concrete Euphoria (2009) is best example that she filmed 360 degree landscape and city lights at night then transformed to look like abstract painting through post-production. Kabul and Mintio also found ‘Ketemu Project,’ an art organization where promotes exchange with local community through the arts and continue their practices while developing many projects and artist-in-residence proagram.

The work, As if the sea should part (2019) to be shown at 2019 Sea Art Festival, is newly reconstructed version of The Current/s We Call Home, a piece commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic ties between Indonesia and Singapore. Inspired by the poem, Emily Dickinson’s As if the sea should part, she links bamboo poles and tapestry with patterns of extinct marine organism images using traditional Indonesian technique to construct sails that moves according to the direction of wind using kinetic devise. This piece conveys the artists’ wish from the perspective of ecology for their audience to feel the loss of marine organisms and the pain of the lives gone forever even though indirect way it is. And it calls for awareness of the ecological threat that marine organisms are facing at the moment and the need of preservation of the ecology.