Wisma Geha Basement Jalan Timor no. 25, Menteng, Jakarta 10350www.rubanah.com

Project by 9 membuka diri bagi berbagai kemungkinan kerjasama dengan penekanan pada proses dialog untuk memperkatya gagasan artistik dan tematik yang bermuara pada acara pameran, presentasi, diksusi seni rupa.

Di akhir 2015, bekerjasama dengan hyphen (hyphen.web.id), Enin Supriyanto menerbitkan buku kumpulan esai seni rupa yang ia tulis selama masa 1994-2015. Peluncuran buku itu disertai pameran Belum Ada Judul (Sangkring Art Space, Yogayakarta). Di acara itu Enin menyatakan undur diri alias pensiun dari kerja sebagai kurator seni rupa. Ia menyatakan bahwa ia akan mulai mengelola acara seni rupa secara swakelola di bawah nama—Projectby9.

Projectby9 adalah upaya untuk mengadakan berbagai kegiatan seni rupa dalam skala kecil, sederhana dan kolaboratif. Projectby9 hadir sebagai ruang kerjasama untuk seniman, kurator, peneliti bidang seni rupa, dan lain-lain. Projectby9 telah mengadakan beberapa pameran, antara lain: Jabbar Muhammad “Potret Parallax” (kurator: Hendro Wiyanto, iCAN, Jogja, 2016); Widi Pangestu “Everything in Between” (kurator: Ignatia Nilu, iCAN, Jogja, 2017), peluncuran dan pameran komik karya R.E. Hartanto “Tales From The Lonely Hill” (Krack! Gallery, Yogyakarta, 2018).

P R O J E C T B Y 9

Wisma Geha Basement Jalan Timor no. 25, Menteng, Jakarta 10350www.rubanah.com

RUBANAH (Ruang Bawah Tanah) bertempat di ruang bawah tanah sebuah gedung di pusat keriuhan Jakarta. Rubanah adalah ruang pertemuan untuk berbagi informasi dan pengetahuan, ruang belajar bersama bagi seniman, kurator, peneliti atau penulis, atau siapa saja yang berminat memperkaya pengalaman dan memperdalam pengetahuan mengenai seni rupa kontemporer.

R U B A N A H

About Artist

Julian Abraham “Togar” (b. Medan, IDN, 1987) is an artist, musician and pseudo scientist. Words like generative, manipulating, dematerialization are often used to identify his work. Connecting one thing to another, expressed in complex algorithms, have enabled his experiences in how art, the environment, science and technology relate to one another to provide new tools to educate and engage both the artist and the society.

Togar tracks the time to explore various kinds of art practices that have been experimenting on sound matters around us. Two decades after our independence, when the New Order began to reign in power, concretism brought together the realm of music, visual arts and literature. This exhibition presents Togar’s search in form of artworks along with his intention to acknowledge all the artists that he had met while roaming this sound tracking.

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Listening is indeed a physical experience. In 2017, I held an exhibition titled Sebelum gendang (Before the drum) at Kedai Kebun Forum. Through that solo, I wanted to present several experiments in observing the physicalities of sound with different forms. In 2018, I did another solo at Cemeti — Institute for Art and Society titled ~IIINNNGGG~ in which I questioned: Is sound a matter? Does sound matter? I deliberately pose these questions in English because of this double entendre. Also because this question sounds simple while at the same time, complicated seeing the word matter has multiple meanings. The word can mean ‘a material’ or ‘a substance’ that is distinct from mind or spirit; as well as ‘holding important or significance’. Other than exhibiting new works, I also worked with friends from Masjid Jendral Sudirman (General Sudirman Mosque) in holding a series of pengajian (studies). Below is an excerpt of my session, Ngaji Bunyi #1:

From a physics perspective we can assume the conclusion that sound is energy, not matter. In physics, we know the law of energy conservation that states energy cannot be created or destroyed but instead can transfer from one form of energy to another. Like electricity produced from sun, wind, steam, gas etc. So it’s possible to use sound to create electricity – sound energy. [Not much longer, electricity became the foundation of sound amplification devices – we now call them as speakers or sort.]

So amplification has become a subject of debate in music circle. Because it’s often viewed as a type of threat to the purity of human expression and the view that talent or genius is innate. Firstly, amplification creates a distance between human and sound. Secondly, amplification is seen to mask human inability – or the lack of musical technique. It also takes over the human voice, and automatically takes command over its expression, emotion and subjectivity. Voice becomes an appendage, like a prosthesis mediated by a machine and destabilising the meaning and reality or authenticity of our voice. What we hear is the air vibrating after being electronically processed making sound material and becoming something entirely new to our bodies.

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Acoustic Analog Digitally Composed #13, 2019.Sound installation, wooden drum, wooden mallets, solenoid motor, DC motor, micro-controller, steel support.

Could we refer to it as a sound object? On May 15, 1948, an announcement was made by a composer, writer, engineer, theorist and philosopher by the name of Pierre Schaeffer who was working as an engineer at Radio France, Paris:

“I have coined the term musique concrète for this commitment to compose with materials taken from ‘given’ experimental sound in order to emphasize our dependence, no longer on preconceived sound abstractions, but on sound fragments that exist in reality and that are considered as discrete and complete sound objects …”

Musique Concrete – meaning real music. True music. Not music made from concrete. Because even if we make music from concrete, but it’s not about music made of concrete, but about true music – so what do we mean by true music? What was music before it if it wasn’t true? This type of music was produced using a combination of a number of voice recordings which at that time used a cassette tape, were cut, stacked, distorted, the speed was changed, or played backwards and edited into a montage. But for Schaeffer, the music isn’t about the train or the whistle, it’s about sound. To him, this is about listening to sounds in a completely new way. Separating sounds from the context they were created. This is what he calls Acousmatic, which means sound that is separated from its original source. Well, it’s in the process of separating. If authenticity was deemed to be compromised by the onset of electric with the prescence of recording technology, sound would be separated from the context in which the sound was created.

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Acoustic Analog Digitally Composed #10/After Haryo ‘Yose’ Soejoto, 2019.Sound installation, wooden drum, DC motor, micro-control-ler, steel support

During the preparation of this exhibition, I found this article of composer Slamet Abdul Sjukur that I am referring here. In his proposal for a definition of contemporary music, he explored the dynamics of musical genres for almost a century. Much like the first half of my session, Ngaji Bunyi #1, where I was tracking art practices that depart from sound exploration. We both began with Futurism and, later on, continued to Schaeffer. This article convinced me that exploring practices that have been done before my time is natural and healthy. This exhibition is an articulation of such tracking. Particularly on multi-disciplinary practices that have some sort of presence within the gallery as the one of the main stages for (visual) art around me, in Jogja, in Medan, in Solo, in Surabaya, in Bandung, in Jakarta. I am also presenting the resources that had become some sort of a foundation for my (artistic) decisions, with the hope that these things can inspire another reading.

— 21 April 2019, Togar —

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Acoustic Analog Digitally Composed #11, 2019.Sound installation, bicycle handlebar, woodblock, plastic mallets, solenoid motor, micro-controller, steel support.

Homeage To

Bonyong Munni Ardhi (b. 1946)

Bonyong is an experimental artist from Solo who was a part of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia/Indonesia New Art Movement. His work Patung Suara/Sound Sculpture (1979) is as simple as an iron hollow cube, covered by a plastic sheet, with a radio inside, looping the recordings of both the opening and closing soundtrack of the Radio Republik Indonesia. Consciously executing sound in the form of sculpture (or installation) was not a common way of art-making at the time. For that, Togar considers this work as monumental. Although there were already many experimental musicians back then, he was one of the very few that came from visual art background. Rarely noticed and documented, this particular work of Bonyong became a precedent to Togar’s roaming. As he puts it, “Looking back [to the past] guides us to not be lost in the future”.

Danarto (b. 1940 – d. 2018)

Danarto was an eccentric artist by all means. As a writer, he caused quite a stir both in the literary and art scene in Indonesia due to his concretism, pantheism and, at times, sufism approaches. One of his work that Togar first got in touch with was a short story titled Cak Ngung, which confused and intrigued him at the same time. Consisting of a mixture of ‘readable’ narrative text, several drawings that somehow mimics sound effects, drawings of futuristic objects, and arrangements of syllables much like concrete poetries, this short story—as Danarto labels it—was first published in a literary weekly and later on in the monograph of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia. In this exhibition, Togar looks at Danarto’s blank canvases as an effort to visualize sounds. As sound is often regarded as something of a void, and yet to Danarto, void is content.

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Acoustic Analog Digitally Composed #12/After Danarto, 2019.Sound installation, wooden drum, DC motor, micro-control-ler, steel support.

Homeage To

Haryo ‘Yose’ Soejoto (b. 1952)

A trained string player and composer, Yose is also involved in numerous art activities, such as the Binal Experimental Arts (1992). His composition, titled Binaural, was of musicians spread throughout the hall, blended with the audience. He wanted to recreate the experience of being in a crowded night market. But, Togar was drawn into Komunitas Bunyi/Noise Community (1999), performed in Cemeti Art House. The ‘concert’ showcased various local laborers—such as carpenters, tomb sculptor, meatball sellers, etc—doing their daily activities in the gallery. Yose positioned himself as somewhat of a conductor, making an orchestra out of those sounds. In a recent interview to Yose, Togar asked if a musician could, or should, be practicing visual arts? In some ways, Yose convinced Togar that those boundaries—visual, music, performing—might not be necessary after all.

Slamet Abdul Sjukur (b. 1935 – d. 2015)

Togar hadn’t heard about Slamet until 2017—when sociologist Emmanuel Subangun visited his exhibition at Kedai Kebun Forum and told him that Slamet would be a crucial reference for his works. Slamet’s compositions were rather hard to find, luckily he managed to get ahold of the compilation of Slamet’s essays, titled Sluman Slumun Slamet (2014). An article featured in the introduction of this exhibition—titled Musik Kontemporer 80 Tahun Silam/Contemporary Music 80 Years Ago (1993)—Slamet traced avant-gardism in music through several musicians cum artists. The departing point of Slamet’s essay was of Marinetti whom Togar also began with in explaining his approach towards sound in his practice (Ngaji Bunyi #1, 2018); and, later on, Schaeffer became a key figure in which the search towards sound practices shifted. Seemingly coincidental, this similar approach may be in better light if seen as a need to constantly question and experiment.

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Acoustic Analog Digitally Composed #10/After Haryo ‘Yose’ Soejoto, 2019.Sound installation, wooden drum, DC motor, micro-control-ler, steel support