Angela Hijjas delivered the opening speech at the opening of this exhibition featuring Malaysian artists from Matahati and Indonesian artists from MIFA Foundation.
Opening Speech by Angela Hijjas
Assalaamulaikum
Tuan Haji Mohd Said Abu, artists, friends:
Thank you for your kind invitation to open this very exciting show. The work represents a unique collaboration between Indonesian and Malaysian artists executed over an intense one-month period in which the artists have lived and worked together without a break. They have produced small individuall pieces, and larger works where one artist starts on an idea, and another completes it, and the final collaboration which resulted in the three dimensional sculptures that fill and envelop this space, on which they have all worked.
Everyone agrees that collaborations of artists across national borders are an excellent thing to do, but few really understand why and would actively organise such an event. I applaud Matahati for taking this initiative, and the Indonesian artists, who with the MIFA Foundaton, raised enough money from their own art practices to finance all the costs involved themselves because they wanted to realise this valuable experience. Matahati has quite an amazing record of involvement in community arts: another recent event with the National Gallery paired them with school children who were introduced to ideas within contemporary art and helped them to develop their own works.
These are both excellent initiatives to encourage cultural development. This month-long residency has formed a much closer relationship between Malaysian and Indonesian artists. Although we share many cultural traditions, it is hard to believe that Malaysia and Indonesia do not have a cultural exchange agreement to improve our common connections. No doubt this stems from the many difficulties we have had as neighbours in the past, but I think, as is happening with Singapore, it is time to put these differences behind us and to develop the real spirit of ASEAN.
Artists are usually at the forefront of developing new ideas; they ignore the restraints that hamper the rest of us and take these important initiatives without the sanction of government departments. Here, I must make a notable exception for Tuan Haji Mohd Said Abu, the Director of Galleri Shah Alam, who has encouraged this project and provided the artists with this most suitable venue to display the results of the residency.
Residencies for artists are important. They allow artists time to work on new ideas, to mix with new groups of creative people who will help them clarify their thinking and hopefully lead to the creation of new bodies of work for the artist in his own art practice. New work benefits the community in our search for cultural development, because we draw on artists’ ideas as a means of identifying ourselves and our culture. Certainly this is true in architecture, where the ideas of artists are sought and drawn upon to develop new approaches to design. The Telekom tower would not be as significant a building as it is without having had the ideas of Latiff Mohidin as inspiration.
As globalisation makes inroads into our lives, we need to search all the more urgently for our own identity. Identity is an enormous problem in the face of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, and now globalisation makes it even more difficult. If we are going to prevent our young people from being cast adrift with no sense of who they are, other than identified by their religion, then we lose our sense of a multicultural Malaysia. Religion is important, and culture incorporates religion, but culture also covers the things we do in our creative time, the music we listen to, the paintings we prefer and the books we read. We need creative people with time to develop new ideas to lead us into a more exciting cultural future than just Play Stations and foreign DVDs.
We must support our artists to develop this new culture, and to do this we need to provide them with places to be creative and to exhibit the results of their work. They need financial support as well, as there is absolutely no truth in the idea that artists have to starve to produce anything worthwhile. That is a pernicious lie that somehow we use to justify isolating and ignoring them.
Residencies give artists time, when they can develop new ideas, perhaps just by mixing with other artists and seeing new solutions and new problems. Stimulating their creativity and allowing them to make the most of their talent is critical, otherwise all that we have invested in educating artists at so many colleges will be wasted.
We Malaysians are exploring a new identity and culture that will be based on traditional values, but it has to change as well to provide a framework for young urbanised Malaysians who are looking for music, paintings, books and plays that reflect and develop their own experience. We need to invest in our cultural development, we need to invest in our artists to make sure that what we leave behind of our generation amounts to more than an RTM Hari Raya Special version of what the Ministry of Culture thinks Malaysian culture should be.
I think this exhibition shows us the way to go in developing our special version of contemporary southeast Asian culture. I congratulate the artists from Matahati:
- Bayu Utomo Radjikin
- Ahmad Fuad Osman
- Ahmad Shukri Mohamed
- Hamir Soib
and the MIFA Foundation artists:
- Yaksa Agus Widodo
- Eddy Sulistyo
- Agus Purnomo
- Januri
I hope that the government and the private sector will realise how important it is to support creative people. They develop our sense of who we are and of our own special culture, and maybe after the election the Ministry of Culture will start its own programme of exchanges and workshops with artists in neighbouring countries. These artists have shown us the way, now it is up to us to follow.
Thank you, and please enjoy the exhibition.