‘Paralysed Mood’, Siregar’s first solo show in Scotland, held at the Bank of Ideas in Rothesay, Isle of Bute in July and August, 2019. This was a multi-media show with a performance arts piece presented at the private view. The show included installations, video pieces, photography, sketches and paintings.
Grace Siregar is beginning to shine artistically. Though not yet as well known as her fellow Batak painter Dolorosa Sinaga, Grace is one of the most acclaimed woman artists in the country, taking part in numerous important contemporary art events.
Born in Tarutung, North Sumatra, on April 16, 1968, Grace studied painting with Ahmad on Bangka Island in South Sumatra from the ages of six to 14. She has beenin the fine arts spotlight over the last two years. But that is only one small component of her career and interests. Grace spent three years in the Netherlands, 1995 to 1998, where she obtained a law degree and worked as a correspondent for Jakarta newspaper. During this time she also spent two years studying under Dutch artist Jan van Stolk.
In Holland, she held a solo exhibition at the Overtoom Gallery in Amsterdam in 1997, and took part in a joint exhibition with daan Heldring at WG Gallery in Amsterdam in 1998.
She made her debut in Jakarta in a joint exhibition at Bezete Gallery, Kebayoran Baru, Jakarta, in February 2000. This was followed by nine joint exhibitions, including shows at Bentara Budaya, Taman Blok M Plaza and the National Gallery, and a solo show at the Semanggi Fine Art Hall in June.
She is currently taking part in a joint exhibition with several other artists at the British Council’s Wijoyo Center in Jakarta. Organized in cooperation with Cemara 6 Gallery, the show will run until Sept 30.
The subjects of Grace’s work, whether on canvas (with various media) or installations, range from reminiscences of her childhood on Bangka to topical sociopolitical issues. She has decorated a tree trunk at the National Gallery and created an installation from a bathtub, toilet, feces and toilet paper.
Generally speaking, her artistic expressions are not to everyone’s taste and some of her works could be described as unpleasant. Despite this, japanesse collectors have shown great enthusiasm for her work, as have Dutch and American art enthusiasts. Indonesian collectors, however, have avoided her canvases, though cultural expert Umar Kayam does have a painting by Grace, having received it as a gift.
“It depicts myself turned upside down, because I had my period and a headache when I was painting. My friend gave it to Umar kayam as a birthday present. I myself don’t know him personally yet, nor have I seen where the canvas is hung,” said Grace with a laugh.
In the past two to three years on intense artistic creation, Grace has been faced with a distinct lack of interest from local collectors. Despite the absence of income from Indonesian buyers, she has not given up hope. She continues to create, with her work piled up at her home in Pasar Genjing, East Jakarta.
As a consolation, Grace likens herself to Vincent van Gogh. During his life, the artist, whose paintings are now worth billions of rupiah, enjoyed scant profit from his work. But still, Grace would like to reap the fruits of her hard work while still alive.
She is aware that, in general, collectors in Indonesia prefer art that presents traditional female beauty. She also knows that her paintings and installations do not fall into this category.
Though the temptation to sell out is great, Grace maintains her ideals and continues to listen to her inner muse, ignoring considerations of commercial success, public preference and the comments of critics and curators.
What she wants upon the unveiling her works is to create a dialog with the public. Therefore, she lets the society be the curator, rather than those whose names are officially listed at museums. It is public art that is her focus.
Grace has observed that her foray into public art has produced diverse, often surprising, and that straightforward feedback.
She greatly enjoys and is most satisfied creating public art pieces, allowing communication with people from all walks of life to take placedirectly, frankly and spontaneously.
Grace has covered trees near the Blok M bus terminal with white cloth and built installations out of photos, plastic and other media at Semanggi. The works drew a range of responses from cigarette peddlers, pregnant housewives and executives.
“Some praised them as wonderful works, while others just called them sheep droppings,” Grace said with some amusement.
Whether wonderful or dung, Grace saw the comments as deserving of respect. To her, open and direct criticism avoids distortion.
Her dedication to public art is in itself absorbing as well as tense. And while exciting, it demands funds for both the creative process and installation. Consequently, she and her husband, young British film director Alexander Tristan Davey, have to live prudently. The solo installation she organized at Semanggi, for example, was made possible by money the couple had saved for a year.
In her view, the works and the artists creating them should be separate. By creating this distance, the art will not be bound by the signature on the corner of the canvas.
So the name “Grace Siregar” cannot be found on her work – instead, somewhat mysteriously, she initials her works “ESH”, short for Elfrieda Solacratia Hanna.
Grace Siregar taps local artists to create public sculptures and other artworks that emphasize themes of peace and reconciliation.
At first, Grace Siregar responded to the political upheaval of 1998 in her native Indonesia with artistic shock. Suharto, the repressive strongman who ruled for more than 30 years, was gone.
In the streets, Indonesians were turning on each other, neighbor on neighbor, ethnic group on ethnic group, to vent their frustration over a generation of political repression and recent economic woe.
Siregar’s oil painting, “My Country,” begun that year while she was abroad in Holland, is a wall-length, sullen, black cloud. “We were famous for our kindness and then we changed to something else – demonic almost,” she says. “I was crying when I painted it.”
But a strange thing happened when she returned to Indonesia and visited East Timor, a restive province that had just suffered through a bloody struggle to win independence from Indonesia. There, Siregar was treated with a surprising tenderness by the ethnic Timorese who had every reason to hate her. Elsewhere in the country, a sense of gentility seemed to be holding on, too.
And so from the ashes of the upheaval came a new mission: to draw fractious groups back together – through art.
Since then, Siregar has been a sort of roving artistic reconciliation show, working to carve out new places for expression as the country explores its thresholds for tolerance in the post-Suharto era. She has gotten rural artists from warring religious groups to contribute to joint art installations in the eastern provinces of Maluku. She has invited a polyglot group of artists to contribute to her free-form gallery in Sumatra. She’s painted peace totems on freeway overpasses and asked diverse painters to depict the devastating Asian tsunami.
Siregar is a classically trained painter who has had works displayed in Indonesia’s National Gallery, but her calling now is helping the country to vent on canvas instead of at one another.
“The most important thing for me now is to make my art contribute to all of Indonesia,” she says. “I’ve had time to think about what I want, and this is what I want.”
Her most successful work so far may be in North Maluku, in Indonesia’s historic eastern spice isles. Post-Suharto violence erupted there in 1999 after a fight between a bus rider and driver in the capital of Ambon swelled into attacks and reprisals between Muslims and Christians. A separatist movement gained new traction among the restless Christian minority.
By the time Siregar and her husband, filmmaker and aid worker Alexander Davey, arrived in 2003, the street battles had stopped but were still fresh in peoples’ minds. She noticed that street artists had been painting murals with reconciliation themes on the sides of old houses and market walls. She sought them out and encouraged them.
At the same time, Siregar, who once worked as a journalist in Europe, started a weekly show interviewing musicians and other performers on a Catholic-sponsored peace channel, Suara Paksi Buana.
After a year building up the cadre of local artists, she and other artists decided to push forward with a demonstrative peace installation, using local materials spread across a large coconut grove in the northern city of Tobelo.
“These guys who were just coconut farmers’ kids were doing the most amazing things,” says Siregar. “They didn’t have any training, but they were born to be artists.”
Much of Grace Siregar’s exhibition at Grey Area is autobiographical. ‘Territories’ opens with a map and handwritten list detailing a series of locations – Sumatra, East Timor, the Netherlands and the UK – where the Indonesian born artist has lived. Less of an artwork, and more of a contextualisation for what follows, it signals an honest desire to communicate her experience to an audience unlikely to have more than a superficial knowledge of the region from which she hailed. Perhaps this is also reason that Siregar has provided such an insistent commentary (in her gallery hand out) in which she explains the works or her motivation for their making. Curiously though, in many cases I got the feeling that the gallery- goer is not in fact the intended audience for the work at all; instead, it seems as her message is directed elsewhere, to herself (cathartically) or to her own family. My Father After Drinking Tea is described as an ode to him and another, made upon having discovered her mother was seriously ill, is said to be an expression of her powerlessness at being so far from home in such a situation. Whilst the work is certainly confessional, in the way that the artist reveals her life and tells of her feelings, it seemed that we were being invited to act as witnesses to a communication, rather than as the intended receivers of that communication.
Despite the particularity of Siregar’s circumstance, and her distinctly personal approach, the gallery insists in its press release that the exhibition deals with “constructs of identity”. I’ll admit that I blanched at this: ‘identity’ is one of those words – like ‘memory’ – to which I’ve developed a bad case of over- familiarity. Since it was first used during the headier days of 80s identity politics, it has been used to tag such a number and variety of exhibitions and projects that its potency within a gallery context now seems to have become diminished and its meaning generic. Perhaps then it was inevitable that the least successful works in ‘Territories’ were those explicitly focusing upon this idea. The two pieces at the back of the gallery offer portraits (in video and photography) of adults and children from different sides of the Indonesian religious conflict. In one work entitled Meaning of Peace, Siregar films Muslim artists giving their own definitions: the actual words, translated into English on an accompanying sheet, offer such platitudes as “peace is something beautiful” (an opinion with which it’s surely hard to disagree?) and thus render a complex idea bland. More interesting is the moment before the people speak, or when they stop and the camera continues to roll: it is then that these talking heads reveal themselves most fully and most subtly. Some look nervously about, we see them swallow and smile; others stare resolutely into the lens; some seem to launch in confidently, whilst other look about them for inspiration. In such moments, they speak louder than mere words would allow.
For me, however, the most engaging work, and one which addressed the gallery audience, was Jakarta Pool Piece, a video projection showing five people (two women and three men) each fully dressed but submerged to waist or shoulders in a modest swimming pool. The six-square grid of its split screen allows us to see each depicted singly, whilst one slot shows all five together in the same pool. The video suggests that these people were required to remain in place for quite some time, and as a result the tiredness, boredom and cold clearly start to tell upon the participants. A woman hunkers down, trying to stay within the warmth of the pool; one of the men manages to remain almost entirely static, his stillness making a mirror of the water; he waits patiently whilst another continually bobs around, stretching and striking poses. Whilst we are informed that the video was made as the artist was waiting to hear about her UK visa and that the participants are all Siregar’s friends, this is much more than a simple illustration of the hiatus in her life: the recorded soundtrack of the Jakarta day slipping by, combined with the participants’ careful movement, translated the work into a slow and intense dance, which continued to sustain my attention during repeated viewings.
Joanne Lee is a Brighton-based artist and writer whose work explores a curiosity about everyday things. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
Part of the Brighton Festival Artists Open Houses 2011, this exhibition explores the various meanings of the word ‘asylum’ (or ‘suaka’ in the Indonesian language): a place of sanctuary, the offer of a safe haven for those fleeing persecution and a place where people suffering from insanity are sent. This second UK one-woman show by Indonesian artist Grace Siregar will be a fascinating interplay between the serenity of this 19th century church environment and Siregar’s engaging and challenging work in video, paintings, sketches and installations. Also with performance art at the Private View on Friday 6th May at 6.30PM.