Harsono is an artist whose has worked consistently since the mid-1970s up to the present. His engagement with New Art Movement (GSRB; 1975-1979), was the reak beginning of search for ‘the social (element)’ in his works. Te paradigm of “the social” for Harsono is the daily reality that is visible in the community itself, it is the connecting thread between the various events that can not to be separated from governace, politics or a regime. Harsono wants to say simply that “the social” is always repressed or is the product of repression.

Harsono’s views about his wotk altered after the shift in the political atmosphere in Indonesia post-1998. The New Oder, the major power that had been the source of his “social” element, had fallen. For several years after the start of the political reform he went through a kind of transition period. He saw that power is not something that is centered in a regime (of modernity, art or politics), but is also scattered and operates daily through various institutions, social practices and relations between citizens. In short, power is everywhere, spread through the whole of society. This was the transition of “the social”as experienced by Harsono, who felt it more or less as a delegtimation process of the principles and codes of his own creating.

Harsono was consious of a sort of mismatch tha had occured between himself as an artist on the one hand, and himself as an individual with a particular identity. Yes, a wrong placement in the middle of the “social” wilderness which impelled him to look for the layes od narrative which had been suppressed, delibarated or not, by himself. Art that almost made “the social” and the discourse about “the social” essential is now face to face with this indiviual Harsono, the artist himself.

This exhibition consist of a selection from the whole range of objects, image and texts or words from the artwork of FX Harsono from 1975 up to the present. The objects are “petilan” or parts of whole works which are generally in the form of installations. The images on display are reproductions of works; representations of exhibitions and the development of researc, and are complemented with text from artist’s statements.

Hendro Wijayanto

Exhibition Curator