Spacing Identities

NUS Museum, Singapore, May 10-31, 2009

Remembrance, Now (excerpt)
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa

“J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra’s Spacing Identities draws upon family portraits from the artist’s past in ilustrating 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 ehich 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 knowledge of the past, now. …”