60 | | MAY 5, 2013

PH

OT

O:

SE

LA

SA

R S

UN

AR

YO

AR

T S

PA

CE

HOW often do we use some-thing without giving it a sec-ond thought? Take our dai-ly use of paper. We scribble a note on pieces of paper—a

note to our future self or to a loved one, a shopping list, a website address or phone number, a sketch while making a call—and then it ends up in the waste bin. We pay with banknotes for our groceries at the lo-cal market, and our groceries are packed in paper bags. We read the news in the papers. Yesterday’s news is used to wrap up some-thing temporarily. Using a bit more consid-eration, artists use paper to create draw-ings and etchings.

Prilla Tania’s current solo exhibition, “E” at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space in Bandung, draws upon both of these ruminations: she has created paper-based artworks by re-us-ing paper to draw attention upon how inat-tentive we are regarding the stuff that sur-rounds us in our everyday lives. And she does so with stoic wit. She re-uses paper

from previous art projects and from the products we can buy at the supermarket for our household needs. Instead of drawing or etching on the paper, Prilla cut them up into various shapes and forms to evoke her green concerns—though, with a subdued wittiness.

Prilla Tania is a graduate from the sculp-ture studio at Institute of Technology Band-ung (ITB)’s art school (2001). Resin, never mind marble, the material sculptors often use, seemed too stiff and heavy for her lik-ing. Since graduating, she ventured into dif-ferent directions concerning techniques, materials and the media she uses: instal-

lation, video, performance, photography, paper-cuttings, patchwork, soft sculpture, shadow-play, drawing, among others. In-termingled with these, of course, have been all manner of overlaps: video performanc-es and site-specifi c video installations, were some that she tried. After graduation, Prilla has exhibited at home and abroad, and has taken part in quite a few residencies.

Residencies are fruitful periods for this multi-media artist. Her most recent residen-cy was at Heden (Dutch for ‘at present’) in the Netherlands in 2012, which she conclud-ed with the exhibition De Chloroman. Chlo-roman is a man who does not eat; he does

The Buoyant Counterweight of a Paper Trail

ARTS

A solo exhibition by Prilla Tania at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space is on till May 11, 2013.

Prilla Tania and her “E” exhibition.

MAY 5, 2013 | | 61

not need to because he has skin of chloro-phyll, the green pigment that absorbs light and turns it into energy. For the De Chloro-man exhibition, Prilla worked with paper cuttings. The leftover paper of this exhibi-tion was used to create the works for “E”. In this way, “E” is the conclusion of the residen-cy in Holland, as well as her way of using the gallery as a temporary studio space to create site-specifi c artworks.

The advantage of her mode of working is that she can set up studio any time and any-where. Paper is a material easy to come by and it is not fragile unlike, say, ceramics, and thus is easy to transport. The material

also only requires a few blades and a pair of scissors. For three months Prilla set up her home away from home (which is near-by, anyway) to work on “E”, which stands for ‘energy’—or the disrupted current of it, for which she had sensitized her ears and eyes towards.

How to allow art to deal with the unintend-ed consequences of modernization, indus-trialization and urbanization? Dealing with a question this big could be a slippery slope for an artist, and could also mount to noth-ing more than moralist sloganism. But this is not the case in the body of work present-ed by Prilla; her approach is very personal,

showing an intimacy between herself as the artist and her chosen material, technique, tools and media, resulting in artworks and ultimately in the exhibition (thus creating a body within a body, as she calls it).

Prilla’s work in “E” looks simple, though one realizes that to make art look simple is hard work. She meticulously cut the paper into a wide variety of forms and shapes. She photographed each piece and turned the photographs into stop-motion videos. Af-terwards, she mounted each work onto the walls using paper-based tape and pins. She re-used paper so as not to add to the cycle of waste. The resultant “E” walks a tight rope between lightness and heaviness: the light-ness of materials and media used, and the ponderousness of the exhibition’s theme.

In the fi rst gallery space—Ruang Sayap (or: Wing Gallery)—Prilla shows the works she titled Daur Energi (The Cycle of Energy) and Voluntarily Dictated. The fi rst work is a considerably large collage of paper cuttings from cardboard food packaging and a stop-motion video. After cutting out the shapes, Prilla had turned the cardboard around—she uses color sparingly—and mounted them to the wall; taken together, especial-ly seen in tandem with the video, we imme-diately sense her concern with the waste of energy in the food production, distribu-tion and consumption process. The second work is a paper mural showing the front sides of re-used packaging, particularly the sections showing the nutrition values of the boxes’ contents. Both pieces work magical-ly in this space, the only minus being the vi-sually too-dominant wall text.

In the second space—Gallery B—the fol-lowing works are presented: Larung (Of-fering), which uses unused paper from her De Chloroman project; “O”, which is a stop-motion video made of paper cut-outs por-traying a sustainable utopia; and Awal (Be-ginning), which is a poetic play on shadows with paper cuttings placed before lights on the fl oor. The only piece that did not quite work for me was Larung, which took away some of the fl ow of the otherwise excellent exhibition. But may be this was also caused by the noisy racket fl owing in from the vid-eos playing in adjacent rooms.

All in all, “E” is a great exhibition. And Chabib Duta Hapsoro has made an excel-lent debut as head curator of Selasar Suna-ryo Art Space after Agung Hujatnikajennong stepped down recently. A possible future Prilla Tania project will be the use of organ-ic paper she plans to produce from fi bers of the Saeh tree growing in her garden.

● ROY VORAGEN (BANDUNG-BASED ART WRITER)