The city’s spatial development has been focusing more on the economical and physical aspects rather than on the social or individual aspects. The individuals in the city’s structure are seen more as the object of the system. With all the flaws in the urban system, individuals in the society are currently in a battle field to fight for space, both the economic and the physical space.
Everything has been set aside to gain economic growth, without adequate attention toward the cultural aspects. This leads to the lack of public and cultural spaces where the society can identify themselves as social creatures, instead of as machines or alienated human beings. It is a difficult thing for us to secure a certain space that can serve as the place to mediate cultural discourses. All aspects of urban life have been dominated by the industrial, commercial spaces, and obviously by authority-dominated spaces.
Jakarta Biennale 2009 (JB 09) ,as an extensive celebration of art, will serve as an attempt to turn art into a reform strategy, engaging the urban subjects, enabling the reflective, critical, and creative ideas to give rise to new spaces that can be more inspiring, participative, and tolerant.
Zone of Understanding
JB 09 will begin by re-introducing what ARENA actually means; opened with a set of exhibitions and simple activities to raise the people’s awareness about what is going on in the society. This is because the society themselves often do not realize that their rights have been taken away—which can be in the form of personal views that are disturbed by the billboards on streets, or unasked-for advertisement messages on our mobile phones.
Public playgrounds, with the encircling iron fences for cleanliness reasons, turn into empty grounds, which are then considered to have no practical functions and finally demolished as the managers consider them to be a burden. Shopping centers, equipped with children’s amusement parks, were originally meant to facilitate the public to fulfill their household needs, but they have turned into consumptive areas, dominating family’s lives with financial demands.
The forms of exhibition in this phase are “one-sided”, presenting relatively classic murals, talk shows, and the likes. These series of early activities will try to raise our awareness about current issues.
Battle Zone
This program consists of a series of workshops and exhibitions that involve many cross-discipline practitioners to review the context of the contemporary spaces in Jakarta and to create new spaces for the public. This entails not only new spaces in its physical term, but also spaces for ideas that relate to many things which might affect the city’s development, such as the technology, economy, politics, history, and the public. The documentation of the project and workshop’s artifacts (outdoor billboards and on-site specific projects) will be displayed in the Fluid Zone section.
This zone focuses on the creation of spaces that facilitate and mediate new ideas in physical and mental terms, to create encounters and public spaces, so that the art, artists, and the public can interact and appreciate one another.
Artworks existing in a certain public space with the special characteristic of the site—spatially, socially, historically, publicly, and politically—become the most important elements. Works in the public space interact directly with unselected audiences: the audience can interact with the works and appreciate them without any distance. The public turns into active participants, becoming neither distant nor passive.
Art activities that are based on problems in the community and urban milieu in Jakarta become an important thing to be used as a starting point.
Art and technology and their relation and impact in society will be the focus of discussion in all activities. We bring out this focus of discussion because the development of technology in these years has been affecting our point of view in seeing “the reality”. Audio-visual media offers us new realities and “truth” that are increasingly more attractive and impressive. Furthermore, this leads to a new reality that can change the social condition. Other themes that we will present are: the phenomenon of community radio and television, the development of computers and games technology, and the virtual reality.
Series of exhibition, the workshop emphasizes on the effort to create new creativity rooms, by artists, community, or collaboration of both, in which the artists play the role as the guides that control the media.
Fluid Zone
International Fine Art Exhibition
Started from the town, to the district, and the country. Should the two previous stages focused on works regarding town, this stage would be wider.
In this phase, our curator Agung Hujatnikajennong tells us again that actually the overlapping processes in various cultures and interests have taken place since a long time ago in the city, country, and geopolitical area where we live, especially after the concepts of “nation-state” and modern cities were applied by post-colonial society. The word ‘Fluid’, which has the negative meaning of being weak when one culture another, yet it positively has the meaning of having the ability to absorb various culture that form a synthesize culture at each country in this region.
In the current time frame, the curator presents two approaches in the theme of the Fluid Zone. This exhibition consists of two sections, i.e. Traffic and On the Map. “On the Map” section will present Southeast Asian young artists whose reputations have been nationally and internationally acknowledged. This section will exhibit art works that represent contemporary problems that the Southeast Asia communities face nowadays, particularly the problems of cities, identities, geopolitical area, and room to maneuver.
The “Traffic” section will present international artists who had been resident artists or visiting artists to the Southeast Asian countries, whose works represent specific viewpoints on the Southeast Asian cultures and societies. This exhibition, basically, wants to invite us to think critically and creatively, and furthermore serves as a warning and perhaps provides answers to existing problems.