FX Harsono

His 2016 solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, The Chronicles of Resilience marked an important new stage in this process. Curated by Leeza Ahmady, independent curator and director of New York’s Asia Contemporary Art Week, the exhibition centered on two new installation works especially conceived for the show, along with video, drawings, and multi-media works. Initially inspired by a cache of documentary photographs taken by his father in the 1950s, Harsono has, since 2009, been actively tracking down little known mass gravesites of ethnic Chinese massacred in his native Java from 1947-49, during the period of conflict leading to Indonesia’s independence in 1949. After years of investigation, and the discovery of many neglected sites, Harsono has created a series of artworks that seek to give form to what has been buried along with the bodies: not only the stories of individual lives, but the historical memory of a nation. The two installations, Memory of the Survivor and The Light of Spirit (both 2016), function as monuments of remembrance, commemorating the specificity of personal tragedies alongside the collective loss, and bringing light to a past that had long been consigned to the darkness. Other works in a variety of media reflect the artist’s own attempts to come to terms with the reality of the sites as physical testaments to history, incorporating documentary materials such as government reports, Google maps and the artist’s own handmade rubbings of inscriptions. “The works embody Harsono’s socio-philosophical lens, which views the life of an individual as intrinsically linked to collective history,” Ahmady explains. “They are a making and recording of history, simultaneously. An encapsulation of a particular people’s experience in a particular place and time, told in ways that create transparent, personal, and emotional spaces for viewers to stand very much apart from negative identity-politics, and instead very close to universal humanity.”
(Taken from Tyler Rollins Fine Art)… (meer)