12.06.2022 — 30.10.2022
Philippe Pirotte, guest curator
Suryodarmo trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, in Germany. A chance encounter brought her into contact with the famous Anzu Furukawa, with whom she studied butoh (a Japanese theatre form that combines different disciplines and techniques, such as dance, performance and movement), following which she took classes in performance art with the renowned Marina Abramović.
Suryodarmo’s performances reflect her own ideas and cultural background, and concern the relationship between the human body, the defining cultural traditions to which the body belongs and the context in which it lives. She focuses on concepts like home, spirituality, family and personal history, interweaving them with socio-political, activist and mainly feminist ideas. Partly as a result of politics and gender discrimination, her work has long gone unnoticed. Through her indefatigable efforts to forge connections between art and artists and society, Suryodarmo has become a key figure in the cultural world of Indonesia. Nowadays, her name is widely known and acknowledged in South-East Asia and elsewhere, yet unaccountably her work has not received a great number of international awards or solo exhibitions.
In agreement with laureate Melati Suryodarmo, Philippe Pirotte (1972, Belgium) was chosen as the guest curator of the exhibition in the Bonnefanten.
The BACA is the most important international award of the Netherlands for artists from other geo-cultural regions. In 2022, it is being presented for the eleventh time. The focus on exciting, under-represented art practices that exceed or lie beyond the geographical and/or cultural boundaries of the dominant Western canon is in line with Bonnefanten’s profile. The museum deliberately chooses to collaborate actively with artists and curators who reinforce and underline the diversity of the museum’s programme and collections.
The members of this edition’s jury (in alphabetical order) are: Sadiah Boonstra, independent curator and cultural historian, living in Jakarta, Indonesia; Zoe Butt, artistic director Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Rhana Devenport, Director Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia; Stijn Huijts, director Bonnefanten, Maastricht, the Netherlands; Victoria Noorthoorn, director Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Alia Swastika, director Jogja Biennale Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Header: Melati Suryodarmo, TRANSACTION OF HOLLOWS, performed at Lilith Performance Studio, Malmø, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Petter Petterson