S.Bin Art Plus is pleased to announce a group exhibition of 13 new works by Ayu Arista Murti, Endira F. Julianda, Gusmen Heriadi, Hojatul, Rieswandi and Taufik. It presents a slice of visual culture today that is a juncture of styles, ideas, places and times. The Everyday Fantastic will be the first exhibition of contemporary Indonesian artists curated by a Singaporean, Wang Zineng, at the gallery, which will be the first of many exhibitions of how Singaporeans view non-Singaporean art in an international setting.

The Everyday Fantastic reinforces and undermines modern myths yet traces a lineage to the international literary and visual art movement in 1940s and 50s American painting and Latin American literature. The works of these artists represent a trajectory in Indonesian art today and revolves about the actual existence of things in the world yet goes beyond a constricting realism, thematically and visually. Collectively, their works present an alternative world of forms and subjects that responds to reality yet brings together what is real, objective and materially present.

Taufik and Hojatulʼs practice is echoed in the works of Rieswandi whose visualisation of abstract forms make distinct references to organic forms in nature. The forms that Rieswandi conceives are barely recognisable but are just on the brink of familiarity that makes possible the scope for imagination. In the direct references made to flora and fauna, Rieswandi indexes the ideas of growth and multiplication that are central to nature. His works demonstrate a world in flux, never at rest in the unceasing cycles of life.

Rieswandiʼs works are joined by those of Ayu Arista Murti who continues in the exploration of themes and subject matters in nature. The protagonists of her present series of work are female Cyclopes-like figures who may trace their origins to a mythical primordial race of giantesses. They find themselves in a fantastical dreamy wintry world populated by creatures reminiscent of what are in the observable world around us but a tad too strange to believe. In this is created a vacillating sense of familiarity and distance — a world unstable in its own reality.

In his oeuvre, Gusmen Heriadi engages intensely with this dual sense of familiarity and distance. For a sustained period of time, his Guests series of paintings where clusters and amassments of bodily forms set within metaphorical landscapes allude to the twinned idea of arrival and departure. The temporal dimension of the world Gusmen Heriadi paints is synchronic, bringing the past into the present and linking it immediately with the future. The various pictorial elements the artist brings to bear in his paintings add to the layering of meaning waiting to be unpacked and deciphered.

Rather than representing a reductive coherence, this exhibition reflects the attitude of the most recent contemporary practice of proposing questions rather than imposing answers, of finding the remarkable breadth and diversity of experience enriching, and embracing what is made possible by activating difference and contradiction rather than uniformity and compromise. Rather than following the necessarily destructive drive of Modern art, these artistsʼ works engage the possibility of generating new meaning through recuperation and the language of repetition, mining a shared culture and art historical field.