Sangkring Art Space and Jogja Contemporary presents: mateREALITY, an exhibition by Anusapati. A vertically quartered log stands apart, quarters equidistant, inviting the observer to enter into its central axis. Looking up from inside, all one can see is a blank ceiling. There is no bushy canopy as one would expect from inside a tree. Something is missing. In the negative space created within the installation titled Going Back in Time, a tension is created through emptiness. I sense a longing for something that is no longer there.
Anusapati was born in Solo (Surakarta) in 1957 and spent most of his childhood in the 60s playing under the shade of tall rubber trees in Cibubur, when it was the rural outskirts of Jakarta. He recalls an early fascination for the wooden tools he would find lying around, be they plantation tools or equipment used in the cultivation of wet rice. Little remains of his childhood haven, as Cibubur is now listed as a site with high-level environmental degradation due to polluting industries.
Throughout his artistic career, Anusapati has always been preoccupied with wood. In recent years, he has channeled his attention to railway sleepers. During his formative years, his family moved frequently between Jakarta, Surabaya, Solo and Jogja. Much of the travel between those places saw him traversing the rural Javanese landscape on trains. The original railway sleepers were made of wood, and have only recently been replaced by new ironwood from Borneo, or iron bars or concrete. There are two powers at play here: decay and economic necessity. The value of wood and iron has shot up such that the theft of railway sleepers is a leading cause of train accidents in Indonesia. The timber's iron replacements are only marginally safer from plunder.
For this exhibition Anusapati acquired old timber that had been retired from its service as sleepers for the sugarcane railways of Central Java. It is of a narrower gauge compared to Indonesia' passenger railway, with sleepers of 120cm length. Some he uses for his railway installation, some for creating pointed sculptural objects. The artist has some idea of what the shapes mean to him, based on the utilitarian impressions he has had of timber tools, but the shapes of his sculptures are stylistically simple, leaving interpretation wide-open.
Asked what he wanted to achieve in his body of work, Anusapati searched for words and came up with the term “materiality” to describe the impression of an actual physical presence he creates in his work, be they stark charcoal sketches, timber installations and sculptures made from timber or brass. The material itself is important to Anusapati for the tactile impressions it lends to the work.
In Architecture, materiality is the applied use of natural materials such as timber and virtual materials such as images or shadows as media for building. Anusapati explores wooden objects in the grey area between his present material experience and the memories invoked by the material.
For this exhibition at Sangkring Artspace, Anusapati reawakens wooden railway sleepers used in the transportation of sugarcane in rural Java, raising them up from the ground to build experiences that evoke many journeys, some taking the observer far back to the memories of sweet cool shade and the magical play of shadows lost when these ancient trees were felled.
-Kadek Krishna Adidharma
