Spacing Identities

J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra's Spacing Identities draws upon family portraits from the artist's past in illustrating the intensely problematic yet stimulating exercise of aestheticizing fragments of everyday life In exposing the eclectic, the fragmented, and the relational concerns of identity. Engaging with specific moments in the artist's life, the works accentuate, perhaps even fixate on exposing the constructedness of our identities which have come to be assumed as natural and given. Amidst the bizarre and the banality represented by family portraiture, it is assumed that there is no need to present a story nor any great proposition, but a discursive plunge, a powerful reconstitution in the present of that position where identity may be expressed.

Therefore, Spacing identities is not entirely about making sense of the people in the aged family photographs or portraits but using such photographs from the artist's past as starting points for an investigation of the "image" itself; as productive acts of remembering knowledges of the past, now. The exhibition space, gently, step by step, in a nonlinear manner, enters this minefield of memory, the tangle of our histories. Herein, for all the painful differences of the postcolonial moment we find ourselves amidst, Pramuhendra's phantasmatic renderings seem to reek of distress and perhaps even of "loss", and of identity as irony.

And it is through these charcoals that we find, lodged amidst the dimmed faces, the shocking reckoning of our earlier selves. The encounter is somewhat extraordinary, for unlike the mirror image or photographic semblance, which, however intensely detailed and "real" can only be retained as a memory which exalts a bygone age, the works of Spacing Identities authorize a (de)layered simulacrum of our past being; at once familiar under the attentive familiarity of Pramuhendra's memories, at once unfamiliar, held in place by the gaze of museum audiences.