Copyright 2001 Carla Bianpoen
First appeared in The Indonesian Observer, 7 April 2001

Of powerful, stirring creativity

by Carla Bianpoen

Jakarta --The fourth solo exhibition of graphic artist Marida Nasution is a breath of fresh air amidst market- oriented art and  controversial discourses about creativity being swamped in the world of sales and big money.

Strong, transparent and committed to the cause of humanity and the plight for a world that ackowledges human dignity, Maridana Nasution is on a continuous path of search, experiments and innovation, taking graphic art to levels that no other Indonesian graphic artist has been able to do so far. Unlike her senior fellow-graphists who left graphic art for the more lucrative art of painting, Marida Nasution just persisted with great integrity and has emerged as an installation artist of class. What makes her even more outstanding is that she never once deserted the idioms of graphic art, but rather made it an undeniable part of her innovative installations.

Marida’s previous solo exhibitions combining graphic with installation art, dealt wit the living environment and the urban dynamics, in which her concern for nature, the less privileged and those positioned at the marginal edge take prominence. She needed a new approach, a new orientation, she explained some time ago, and instead of switching to painting as many graphic artists have done, she searched for alternatives, eventually venturing into installations.

Causing a stir in 1997, her installation of ‘Urban Dynamics’ in her third solo exhibition at Galeri Cipta in Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) may be considered the beginning of her serious involvement in graphic installation art. Visualising daily city images of beggars, newspaper boys, street cleaners,  jamu women inprinted on plexiglass slabs which were arranged in rows, and colored by the lights coming from the bottom, the installation placed a stirring focus on the staggering condition of this segment in the capital city. The installation took even more prominence when it was positioned at the top of the steps in the Regent hotel in May 1998.

Now, three years later, Marida again deals with the marginalized. Her own heart conditiona and hearing impairment may have contributed to her strong sense of suffering, and her plight to put an end to the round of ignorance, desire and pain.The marginalized in the exhibition titled ‘Harkat Perempuan’ are women, a theme that has always had her close attention.

In this sense, ‘Harkat Perempuan’, the major among the three presented at the National Gallery from March 21 through 31, can be seen as an outcry for justice and recognition, and while the theme deals with women in general, her artistic expression is strongly colored by her own inner experience. In a sense one may say that the work is a self portrait. In her art, Marida actually speaks about herself. As noted art critic Jim Supangkat puts it: it reflects constructing the self.  Although her theoretical argumentations about feminism are somewhat confusing, her art work is a firm plight for women as part of the human race.

Women’s dignity or  harkat perempuan is an impressive installation containing graphic art, sculpture and painting, which wishes to place emphasis on the strength, power  and right to women’s dignity. It is evident in the technical construction of double screens in the pyramids, though the material of acrylic looks light and fluid by its transparant nature.

Women’s dignity belongs to the highest values in human life, it is God-ordained, states Marida. To express this high esteem, the harkat perempuan installation is marked by pyramids, a form associated with the triangle, a symbol of glory, esteem and importance. Its significance goes back to ancient Egypt where it was used for funerary structures to honor their diseased kings, and the Javanese wayang plays in which it is capitalized as the gunungan to indicate the beginning and the end, while the triangle is also found in the Christmas tree symbolising for Christians the birth of the Saviour.

Three pyramids made of transparent synthetic fibre are placed at different levels, each containing a 65/68 cm high sculpture imaging women in the three important phases of their life, as a girl, a woman in her prime time, and as a woman in the autumn of her life. Graphic prints on the pyramids indicate the three phases with white blue skies for the girl to denote innocence, urban structures for the woman in her productive age, and green leaves for the woman who has lived her life. At first sight, there is a deceptive notion, that women are bound to be captive, whether at village, urban or other levels.The continuous clockwise circling of the transparent pyramids symbolising that life goes on anyway, intensifies this notion.

 To the left and the right are dozens of the same sculptures, but in small, 30 cm sizes. The figures within the pyramid seem to tell of women bondage, that only enables to view the world pass by but never to be empowered to step out of the double- triangle in which they are caged. Some people find the many little figurines next to the pyramids disturbing, but maybe this is exactly what Marida wishes to effect. One can’t be heard if one cries alone, it has to become a massive cry.

Serving as a background is a five-meter high artwork combining graphic art and painting meant to support the concept denoted by the three acrylic pyramids. However, one can’t help the feeling of unfulfilled desires and aspirations. Symbols like the ball, a woman holding a baby and birds in free flight may well suggest the unreachable from a personal perspective.

‘Harkat Perempuan’ proves Marida as an able, professional artist whose installation art encompasses graphic art, painting and sculpture and who personally works out her concepts into realisation.. With her own hands she has made all the silkscreen printing, moulded the clay for the sculptures and painted the images on the large painting. Every single aspect, component of this spectacular installation was handled by the artists herself. She loves the sensations of personal touches, the communicative vibrations during the process of creation. Perhaps only the very technical aspects had to be left to a technician, who is bound to follow her precise instructions

It seems, every time Marida holds a solo exhibition, she has ventured into something new. This time, she has added sculptures to graphic art, and plexiglass, distancing herself from the usual process of sculpting which starts with a small sculpture to follow up with a larger one. Marida starts with the large sculptures, and follows up with the smaller ones. Another new feature in this exhibition is the accompanying music composed by noted new-music proponent Tony Prabowo, and the fragrance of typical tropical flowers, all of which are felt as intensifying the sombre ambience.

The second installation is titled Peristiwa or Incident, conveying the artist’s profound sadness over the numerous incidents of horrible violence sweeping over the country, and affecting all layers and ages of society, men, women, children, and indiscriminative of gender. There is no rage, though, only a moving presentation of what such horrid events leave behind. The repulsion of the burnt headless and armless figures is softened by the colors that are in the graphic images against the wall. Instead of hate, there is the notion of pasrah which means something between acceptance and surrender.

The installation includes the three walls which are covered with paper panels. The left panel features square compartments filled with the contours of balls symbolising human heads. On the right side in-between the squares stands a woman figure, sadly holding a baby head, while on the left side of the panel a street sweeper is positioned in action of sweeping the debris the violence. The street sweeper holds a real sapu lidi (brush of palm leaf ribs) with sculptured arms and hands which are linked to the image, thus affecting a depth of the real. The walls are covered with prints suggesting the heads of victims of violence. Marida did each and every print of the 400 heads herself. It took her numerous days. The right wall also has contains graphic prints of portraits.

The center wall places a graphic, colored, print of 2 x 3 meters featuring abstractions of women figures mourning the death of a beloved, who is placed in a lying position.

Six beheaded figures sit on chairs made of black colored wires, and are covered with black gunny bags. Fine, white, almost invisible plastic chords hanging from the ceiling symbolise a situation of being enclosed in the circle of violence.

Tersangka or ‘The Suspects’ is not as strong as the previously described installations, yet it reveals Marida’s ongoing concern with suspected actors of violence, who have ruined the lives of so many women, but remain unknown. A pregnant woman figure is positioned amidst three suspects suggested by skeletons made of wire, their faces covered with masks. The woman figure is grey colored, which Marida says is to denote that it’s an enforfced pregnancy. Withering trees in graphic print at the back symbolize the condition of a woman who has been raped.

With the three installations, were also 50 graphic works on paper. As usual, Marida’s graphic art are made using the method of serigraphy or silkscreen printing. Unlike the case with other graphic processes, these images can be rendered in paint as well as in ink, thus allowing the use of color.

Marida Nasution is, I believe, fundamentally a dramatic artist who deals with the plight of the marginal and the oppressed, not as an activist but just following her inner self which finds her sense of constraint and relative isolation reflected in the emotional tensions of the marginalised and less favorable in society. Her creative powers and superb draftmanship, as well as her consistency have made her the most outstanding of Indonesia’s graphic artists and the most notable in graphic installation art.

Born in 1956, she is third in a family of five daughters. Her mother, Nursyamsu Nasution was a teacher of the Indonesian language who used to write poetry, had been a member of the Jakarta Arts Board twice during her life time, while Marida’s father, was a lawyer who liked to draw. Thus art was a revered occupation in her family.

In view of her heart ailment and ear infirmity, her parents only allowed her to go to the school which was nearest to their house. It happened to be the Jakarta Fine Arts Institute and she was enrolled for the department of painting. To everyone’s surprise and shock, she switched to graphic art, just because the Institute received a brand new  machine for the graphic art section. Soon Marida found graphic art offered more varied possibilities than painting, and what is more, it is the most democratic of visual media with the widest distribution of original works at the lowest cost.  She then decided to purchase a machine for her own personal use, for she felt the need to have it available at all times. She also was determined not to have anyone assisting her, a decision which worried all those who were concerned about her delicate health.

The holder of such prestigious awards like the Pan Pacific Art Award (Seoul, 1985), the Ljubijana International Biennale of Graphic Arts Award (Yugoslavia, 1989), and the Special Pin of the 2^nd Mediterranean Biennale of Graphic Art (Athens, 1990), Marida’s latest international participation was in 1998, and at three places at that, i.e. in the International Print Portfolio on the occasion ot eh Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of human Rights at the Durban Art Gallery in South Africa, the 5^th Biennale of Graphic Art Beograd ’98 in Cvijeeta Zuzoric Art pavillion in Yugosalvia, and the Women in the Realm of Spirituality exhibition at the Pontifical University Gregoriana in Rome.

Marida’s development as an artist is consistent and continuous.While it was by her prints that she was known and her numerous graphic works have brought her international awards, her latest ventures with installation art are bound to take her to even higher levels of recognition. Even before the close of the exhibition, Marida received an invitation to exhibit her ‘Women Dignity’ installation in Bangkok around November this year.

As Marida’s frail body drags her around town to the corners of human suffering, her plight for the underprivileged becomes more insistent. Exploring human emotions, her art enters new realms of expression, but in experimenting with new innovative modes, she consistently and intriguingly includes the idioms of her graphic basis. It is with great expectation that we may look forward to the next solo exhibition of this resourceful artist.