Paintings by Farhan Siki.
At Biasa Art Space, Jl. Raya Seminyak No. 34, Seminyak.
Tel. 8475766.
It is fascinating how street graffiti has established itself
into an art form. Maybe it all began when starstruck lovers
committed themselves to eternal love by carving their names,
with a heart and date, onto a tree. Anyway, graffiti has been
around since the Roman times. Archeologists found scribble
notes and sexual images scratched onto the walls of Roman
public toilets. These days graffiti takes the form of elaborate
spray paintings on the trains and public property of all urban
cities. It is all very transitory, as it is quickly painted
over, only to reappear the next day. Graffiti was originally
called vandalism, but in the 1970s street graffiti gained
acceptability. Feminist artists defaced provocative advertising
images of women, while other artists rejected the gallery
system, preferring the walls of public buildings as their
canvases. Some ‘graffiti’ artists, like Jean-Michel
Basquiat and Keith Haring, later gained respectability in
the gallery system, while others ‘legalized’ graffiti
by becoming ‘urban artists’, working on commissioned
or un-commissioned Public-Space Art projects in the city’s
streets and neighborhoods. Often in association with the local
community.
Farhan Siki is not your ordinary artist. He was born in 1971
in Lamongan, East Java, and from 1992 he studied painting
at the UKM-Seni Rupa in the Fine Art Extra-Curricular Department
of the Jember State University, but, in the year 2000, Farhan
graduated from the Letters and Arts Faculty of the History
Department of the same university. Farhan regards himself
as an ‘urban artist’, and since 1998 there is
virtually no public-space art project throughout most of Java
that hasn’t involved Farhan in the initiatives, ideas,
and implementations of the works. Speaking of these projects,
Farhan states: “The urban theme agitates me with respect
to a weird phenomenon of a life in a big city, where people
seem to have to keep up with a hurried rhythm, to work like
machines, to wear expressionless, strained faces, but at once
be optimistic about their fortunes. Indonesian cities have
hypnotized people in the millions to join in and follow such
urban rhythms. Working, working, working so that afterwards
they can buy dreams and fun. This phenomenon provides the
attitudinal background for my works, in trying to record and
represent chronicles from the urban life that I myself have
experienced”. In his exhibition ‘Urban Ruptures’,
at Biasa Art Space, Farhan Siki presents a selection of paintings
and panels that obviously derive from his experiences in public-space
art projects, and the works display the themes and various
influences in his art. They can stand independently as “little
stories that re-introduce the image of human life in an urban
setting, and which provide a depressing and unavoidable representation
of the struggle for survival”.
The intention of Farhan’s art is subversive and political.
It enables him to articulate and participate in the issues
of the city and its inhabitants. To inform, to surprise, to
represent and even to bring about change. His art is a form
of primitive picture writing, able to express thoughts or
note facts. A language of images and signs rooted in the circumstances
of his urban life.
Throughout his work Farhan uses painting techniques that have
much ‘street’ credibility. His spraying and stencil
styles appear appropriated from ‘graffiti’ art.
The occasional text suggests semiotic statements that would
be easily understood by the ‘X’ Generation, exposed
to the encapsulated language of television and advertising.
The ‘graffiti’ enamel paint leaves glowing trails
that suggest instantaneous speed, while the use of lettering,
cutting, printing and spraying techniques bring to mind the
posters, banners, billboards and hoardings which are to be
found in any urban environment.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Italian Futurists
expressed an almost limitless optimism in respect of the potential
of all things modern. Their works were a hymn to the contemporary
urbanism of their times. They idolized the skyscraper, the
automobile and the airplane. The Futurists were fascinated
by machine technology and all things progressive. It is interesting
that over the last 100 years urbanism and progress, which
was once admired, has now come to be deplored. In his work
‘Repertoire’, Farhan depicts a Futurist-like image
of a pair of disembodied human legs manipulated by countless
wheels, cogs and pulleys. Contrary to celebrating the ‘machine’,
Farhan suggests that most Indonesians in general feel more
at ease living their agricultural lives, pursuing harmony
with, and obedience to, the cycle of natural laws. This is
in opposition to the rhythm of life of urban people, which
is highly mechanical, monotonous and depressing. Farhan doesn’t
depict the ‘mechanical’ urban environment as a
symbol of a Utopian culture. Instead, his ‘machine’
becomes the metaphor for the absurdity, irrationality, banality
and harshness of the life of a city, like Jakarta, which has
no respect for nature. A city such as this, Farhan proposes,
is a victim of an out-of-control process of modernization
and extensive transformation, growing and sprawling in all
directions without organization. What Farhan is correctly
suggesting is that rapid urbanization is changing, for the
worst, human life styles, family structures, the Indonesian
identity, and even the individual.
Continuing with his theme of urban mechanization, Farhan has
also included in his exhibition a large multi-paneled installation
created specifically for the Biasa Art Space. Sprawling across
these many fabric panels ‘man’ and ‘machine’
can be seen in an elaborate ‘battle for supremacy’.
The work captures the depressing story of the struggle for
life in any big city. The visual codes, and occasional pieces
of text, which feature in this work, suggest extreme disorder.
Human heads and torso are depicted engulfed and entangled
by the ever present machine. The work is highly pessimistic,
and it renders the growth of a mega-city, like Jakarta, into
a dark force which methodically converts human beings into
soulless forms of mechanical evil.
In the work ‘The Corner of You’, urban reality
is shown as an abrasively textured wall, on which a shadow,
similar to those to be found in Hiroshima, seems to be entrapped
by the wall itself. The agitated brushwork, and stark composition
of the painting, appears to indicate an unappealing concrete
panorama. Strange urban myths surface in the painting ‘No
Identity’, which depicts faceless red demons or phantoms
aggressively hunting through the streets of a nondescript
city, while, the harsh realities of urban life appear to be
implied in the canvas ‘The Dream Has Gone’, which
shows a man skulking away with something of symbolic value
that he has stolen from a bell jar. These little snippets
of scenes from contemporary urban life only reinforce Farhan’s
vision of a cold and cruel dehumanizing environment.
Through his art, Farhan tries to make sense of his urban environment.
With ironic observations and mockery he challenges the belief
that urbanization, and the rapid and extreme transformation
of the physical structure of any city, can improve the lives
of the community and the individual. Farhan’s paintings
reshape our perceptions about the urban environment. Hopefully,
urban planners and developers are watching and listening and
taking note.
