Southeast Asia – a geographically compact but culturally dense region – is formed over a century-long experience of colonization, nationalism, military dictatorship, urbanization and neo-liberalisation. This history of epistemological violence has produced a rich offspring of contemporary practices that address the dislocations of place and self. From this edition onward, TPAM will identify artists and works that capture the inheritance of a chequered past and the realities of the complex present. Through the lens of contemporary independent artists, we will experience the multiple iterations and mobility of identity that arise inevitably from the transcultural processes of constructing bodies, gestures and languages.
The triptychal works of Eisa Jocson (Philippines) and Melati Suryadarmo (Indonesia / Germany) offer readings into female performativity as their bodies shift from one cultural space into another, creating embodiments and affects that are deep and also unstable. Eisa Jocson moves her professional pole dance practice into an artistic milieu and disavows her own image, then attempts to incarnate as a macho dancer from the subcultural Manila club, and finally grafts her body into a ‘japayuki’ entertainer from the Philippines working in the Japanese salaryman bar. Melati Suryadarmo subjects her body into a regime of repetition in EXERGIE – butter dance and then a durational performance of I LOVE YOU, chronicling her displacement from Indonesia to Germany, and returning to a ritual body where self-possession is re-examined in ‘Borrowed’.
For Eko Supriyanto (Indonesia), it was a journey of discovery from central Java to remote Jailolo to encounter the youths of a marine paradise that is also a conflict zone of religious dogmas. Investing time and dialogue into a relationship – both artistic and personal – with his new ‘community’, Eko negotiates many layers of differences to create Cry Jailolo, a work that addresses ethics of ‘collaboration’ between ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’, and what is politically at stake in performance today.
