Resident Artist

Ibed Surgana Yuga

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General repetisi Kapai-Kapai (atawa Gayuh) oleh Kalanari Theatre Movement di Teater Atap/Anjung Salihara, Jakarta. Photo: Eva Tobing

Ibed Surgana Yuga was born in a traditional Balinese farming family, 14 August 1983. He has been living in Yogyakarta, Java since 2003 to complete his theatre direction study in the Theatre Department of the Indonesia Arts Institute of Yogyakarta.

In 2012, Ibed initiated the Kalanari Theatre Movement, an institution which conducts cultural movements through theatre works. The objective of Kalanari is to reaffirm the bond between performance and society, and to inspire people to develop their cultures. In Kalanari, Ibed has framed his works through the concept of engaging intimately with space with ‘space’ understood both in a broader social and cultural context and more narrowly as the physical (natural and architectural) space of performance. His theatre works are site-specific so as to give highest value to improvisation.

He’s applied this concept by working with groups such as villagers, labourers, traditional art communities, domestic workers, interdisciplinary artists, etc. Ibed has worked in and around Indonesia, in historical, natural and architectural sites. He has also worked internationally, in Japan, Singapore and Ireland. He’s given meaning to his works as not just a collaborative artistic work, but a cultural dialogue. According to Ibed, theatre is neither for the creation of only performances or artistic works; it has a noble vision and mission to develop society’s cultures by emphasizing values of humanity.

During his short residency at Rimbun Dahan, Ibed wants to create a theatrical work based on ideas of engaging intimately with the natural, architectural and textual (story, history, myth, etc.) aspect of the site. He aims to choose a site in Rimbun Dahan by digging into the many textual aspects of the site, which will then be interpreted to create a site specific performance which is blended with his cultural background. He hopes to collaborate in this endeavour with local artists in any disciplines.

Find out more about Kalanari Theatre Movement, and see photos and videos of Ibed’s work on Flickr and Youtube.

Lucy Marinkovich

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Lucy Marinkovich

Lucy Marinkovich is a Wellington (NZ) based professional contemporary dancer, choreographer, and the founder of multi-disciplinary performance collective the Borderline Arts Ensemble. Lucy choreographs regularly for Footnote New Zealand Dance Company and is a guest tutor at the New Zealand School of Dance and Toi Whakaari. She trained at the New Zealand School of Dance before joining Footnote Dance Company, touring New Zealand extensively and internationally. Lucy was awarded “Best Emerging Female Artist” by Tempo Dance Festival in 2010, “Best Female Dancer” in 2011, and has been awarded the Eileen May Norris Dance Trust Scholarship and the Creative New Zealand Tup Lang Choreographic Award.

In 2013 Lucy studied Gaga technique with Batsheva Dance Company and in 2014 undertook performance and research projects in Germany, Spain and Austria and was also was invited to dance in the World Dance Alliance’s International Choreolab in France. She returned to New Zealand to choreograph works for Short+Sweet Dance Festival, Tempo Dance Festival, and the Wellington Dance Festival. In 2015 Lucy created a durational five-day performance art piece, The Bosch Box, for The Performance Arcade ‘Container Series’.

In early 2016 Lucy created Centerfolds, her third dance work on Footnote Dance Company, and Good Good Fortune, a performance installation for INSTINC Art Gallery in Singapore. Lucy is now undertaking a Choreographic Residency at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand and the Asia New Zealand Foundation. While in residence she will collaborate with local dancers to make a new work for Penang Dance Day Festival. In late 2016, the Borderline Arts Ensemble has been invited for a Choreographic Residency at the Mediterranean Dance Center in Croatia.

 

Pitchaya Ngamcharoen

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Sugar balls from Calling Lost Brother by Pitchaya Ngamcharoen 2015

Pitchaya Ngamcharoen is Thai artist based in Chiang Mai and Bangkok. As an animal spirit, Pitchaya has always been drawn to her own species — non-human. Her artistic process usually involves animals and human participants to create a form of transparent overlap which is then transformed into an art event or object. The outcomes are often shown in interactive installation, sculpture and online sites.

Her last experimental project, “Calling Lost Brothers”, is a project which aims to visualize an animal as an unnoticed and unperceived territory. Conversations between the artist and other species are easily made when we share one thing in common — energy resources.

Pitchaya is interested in the overlapping layers of human living space and that of animals. In the city, a small amount of people realize or care about animate creatures living underneath or above us unless they bother them. In this project, sugar is used to track ants which live in the same building with the artist. The ants’ trails are marked and preserved. The audience is presented with a map showing these ants’ trails and invited to explore the building through the ants’ eyes.

Pitchaya will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for the months of April and May 2016.

For more information, you can visit her blog and Facebook page.

Goh Sze Ying

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Sze, image credit: Verónica Troncoso

Goh Sze Ying (b. 1983) is a visual designer and researcher based in Kuala Lumpur. In the past decade, she has had many disparate roles in the areas of art, design, and urbanism. Her work is predominantly concerned with the relationship between design and politics in urban public space.

Between 2011 and 2014, Sze led an initiative advocating participatory urbanism called #BetterCities. While at #BetterCities, she developed various programmes – from public talks, private-public partnerships, workshops, research projects and urban interventions – framed around how art, design, and architecture can introduce tactics and situations capable of transforming the city into a playground of collective or individual actions. Some of these projects had been exhibited in Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, and George Town. More recently, she completed her MA in urban sociology in London and a research residency at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U) in Berlin. Since then, she is more focussed on research-based projects.

Presently, she is researching and developing an exhibition that will be staged in 2017 as part of a curatorial development programme under the aegis of Japan Foundation Asia Centre. Her exhibition proposal foregrounds the Southeast Asian haze crisis as a framework of inquiry to tease out socio-economic, geo-political, environmental, and technological narratives and issues in Malaysia and the region.

Her residency at Rimbun Dahan is intended to explore and develop a curatorial approach to look at exhibitions as archives and exhibition-making as a research methodology.

http://cargocollective.com/sze

Sarah Jane Parton

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Sarah Jane Parton

Sarah Jane Parton (Omoka, Tongareva, Avaiki-raro) is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and curator who works across performance art, installation, moving image, drawing, photography, creative writing, and ephemera. She creates work that operates as social commentary, and consistently engages with the politics of being, often through collaboration.  She is based in Wellington, New Zealand and is a lecturer in the School of Art at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts.

She studied Design and Fine Arts at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts, graduating with an honours degree in Time-based Art in 2003. In 2012 she completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters.

Sarah achieved success straight out of art school when her single channel video work, she’s so usual (2003), was included in Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art, New Zealand – an inaugural survey of contemporary art at Wellington’s City Gallery. Since then she has featured in multiple group shows and public screenings both nationally and internationally, and has held six solo exhibitions, including Guidance at The Physics Room, Christchurch, and The Way at The City Gallery Wellington, both in 2007. From 2010 to 2014 she curated the visual arts component of the boutique music and art festival Camp a Low Hum. She is a member of the feminist art-rock collective, Fantasing.

Sarah currently lives in Wellington with her partner, musician Luke Buda (The Phoenix Foundation), and their two sons, who will be joining her for her three month residency at Rimbun Dahan from March to June, via a grant from the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

(Text adapted from CIRCUIT and Massey University’s website)

Bruce Pashak and Janet Langdon

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Where Are You From, 3D lenticular, Bruce Pashak

Bruce Pashak is a multidisciplinary unrealist artist who uses imagery, text and technology to create abstracted anti-narratives that both affirm culturally-encoded associations and break free of these limitations. The images become an experience, a slippery personal tour through existentialism where the meaningful is unhinged and the meaningless finds its private value. He creates art forms as playgrounds for the imagination. Pashak calls them, “riddles that you might try to puzzle out but never need to solve”.

A masters graduate of the University of Calgary, Bruce Pashak continues his theoretical inquiries into the construction and dissemination of perception with a studio practice that includes combinations of painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed media and 3D lenticular technology. Pashak has had over 40 group and solo shows throughout Canada, the USA and Europe, including the Toronto Art Fair and most recently the Miami Art Fair, Dec 2015 with Back Gallery Project. He has an upcoming solo show in Nov, 2016 at Back Gallery Project in Vancouver, BC. Pashak was a professor in the Faculties of Fine Arts at three Canadian universities for a culmination of 16 years. His works are in private and corporate collections, including the University of Calgary, University of Lethbridge, Nickle Arts Museum, Vancouver General Hospital and the Art Hotel in Calgary. He is represented by Back Gallery Project in Vancouver, BC, Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary, AB, and Buckland Merrifield Gallery in Saint John, NB.

Pashak has recently formed the creative collaboration “PLACE” (Pashak Langdon Affirmative Common Experience) with textile artist Janet Langdon. Langdon studied serigraphy at Langara College and textile design at Capilano College and ran her own furniture upholstery business in Vancouver for 10 years. Her textile background brings the element of pattern design into the art works, aligning itself with the philosophy of the neopatternist theory of connections.

Bruce and Janet will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan from February to end of March 2016. For more information on Bruce’s work, you can visit his website.

Arko Datto

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Arko Datto

Arko Datto was in residency at Hotel Penaga from February to April 2016.

My aim with photography is two-fold. I want to push the boundaries of photography, question what it means to be a photographer in the digital age while simultaneously playing the role of observer and commentator on critical contemporary social issues. I was on my way to a doctorate in the theoretical sciences before I decided to change course and explore the burgeoning field of contemporary photography.

I have been promenading across the globe for the past few years and am presently awaiting the next adventure the four winds will carry me to. Apart from working on my own photography related projects, I enjoy playing curator too and have been associated with the Kochi Biennale and OBSCURA Festival of Photography in this role.

Exhibitions & Projections:

  • Gangetic Interludes screened at VOIES OFF, Arles. 2015.
  • CROSSINGS shown at Angkor Photo Festival. 2014.
  • CROSSINGS exhibited at Mindpirates Vereinsheim, Berlin. 2014.
  • CROSSINGS exhibited at OBSCURA Festival of Photography, Malaysia.2014.
  • Paris: La Vie des Autres shown at the Angkor Photo Festival, 2013.
  • The River shown at the Delhi Photo Festival, 2013.
  • CYBERSEX and The River shown at OBSCURA, Malaysia. 2013.
  • Solo exhibition Realms Nocturna at the Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata. 2012.

Ineza Roussille

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Ineza Roussille

Ineza Roussille

Ineza Roussille is an independent documentary filmmaker from Malaysia. She’s produced videos for local NGOs on various social issues. These include videos for Yayasan Chow Kit on street children, for the Joint Action Group for Gender Equality (JAG), a coalition of local feminist civil society organisations, on the importance of women’s participation in the elections (Undi Anda, Suara Anda), a series for PT Foundation on People Living with HIV (PLHIV), and for UNICEF on children’s rights in Malaysia. Currently Ineza is working on an ongoing campaign called I Am You: Be A Trans Ally, which aims to raise awareness on the issues of the Transgender community in Malaysia, and complement the efforts regarding the recent judicial challenge against laws that infringed on the rights of the Trans* community.

Other than her documentary work, she has also worked on several creative side projects, including a short film entitled Blackbird, and a mockumentary on lesbians in KL entitled, Angmo & Amoi. Angmo & Amoi has been screened at various queer film festivals including in Manila, Philippines, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Austin, Texas in the USA. She recently won first prize for the PLHIV series at the Red Ribbon Short Film competition, organized by the Malaysian AIDS Council.

She’ll be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for January 2016 to work on a memoir project to explore the story of her father’s life, which may be turned into a graphic novel further down the line.

“As fulfilling as my journey into video activism has been, I feel like I need to step away from the camera and focus more on my writing. My father passed away in March this year, and while clearing out his apartment, I realized I was surrounded by his life story. From the primary school report cards that he kept, to the disgustingly smoke stained walls of his apartment, the visuals in that space painted a picture of him I knew so well, and yet did not understand at all. I realized I needed to write his story, from the perspective of the only person who had the experience of being his child. In writing his story, I hope to allow myself the space to personally grieve his loss, and at the same time produce a story that would make him proud.”

 

Priceless: Featuring works by 2015 resident artist Al-Khuzairie Ali

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Priceless: Featuring works by 2015 resident artist Al-Khuzairie Ali

PRICELESS Web header

Rimbun Dahan presents Priceless, showcasing works made by ceramic artist Al-khuzairie Ali during his six-month residency from July to December 2015, where he explored the concept of human connection to the external world (an ongoing focus in his work) through the subject of animals. The external world overflows in Rimbun Dahan, a green lung home to a variety of wildlife, tucked away from the bustle of the city. Within the grounds humans, animals and plants alike live under a canopy of branches, leaves and steel beams, providing fruitful intersections of the organic and the constructed. This setting provided the perfect incubator for the artist and his explorations.

Khuzairie hails from Pahang, home of the largest portion of Taman Negara, one of the oldest rainforests in the world. This sense of place informs his connection and exploration of the natural world time and again – from his studio in Puncak Alam he began to think of what used to be lush, thick jungle disappearing under development and construction, habitat disappearing under greed. “I look at the hideous side of the human character which has an impact on other beings in the ecosystem,” says Khuzairie of his inspiration. “We know that some animals are threatened with extinction but the modern world focuses on the importance of money and this has many people losing their judgment and ignoring the nature of life.”

We invite you to visit the exhibition and experience Al-Khuzairie’s work as well as the surroundings that made the work possible.

OPENING HOURS:

Weekends 10am – 6pm, Monday to Friday by appointment
16 – 24 January 2016

Admission is FREE.

Rimbun Dahan is also hosting our annual dance event, Dancing in Place, a series of site-specific contemporary dance performances by dancers from all over Asia, on 16 and 17 January.

There will be a guided tour of Rimbun Dahan’s grounds and traditional village houses at 9am on Sunday 24 January, conducted by Angela Hijjas. For the event page on Facebook please click here.

Chan Aye & Phyu Mon

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Chan Aye & Phyu Mon

Chan Aye (b. 1954) is a sculptor, installation artist, painter, and writer from Myanmar. He was self taught before going on to study traditional Myanmar painting between 1986 and 1989. He has developed a unique pictorial language that is inventive and at the same time inherits the iconography of Myanmar cave painting and mural paintings, as found in the temples at Bagan, Sitkaing, and Po Win Taung in North Myanmar, as well as his studied interest in Western art, which the artist has studied in magazine and book reproductions through the years. His art is rooted in physicalizing the various states of life’s existence and spirituality, and engages with the dualities of material and immaterial forms: color, time, and the dimensions of human emotions, of anger, love, hate, and greed, with diverse materials such as paint, wood, marble, glass, sandstone, and paper from Myanmar Shan State, silk, motor equipment, lighting, bronze, and steel. Searching for new ways to merge traditions with the contemporary condition, he continues to create art through periods of political turmoil and change, and in the aftermath of the devastating Cyclone Nargis in 2008. Chan Aye has exhibited in Singapore, Germany, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, China, New York, and London.

Phyu Mon (b. 1960), writer, photographer, performance artist, and painter, grew up in an environment distinguished by strong tradition and rich culture. Since her teens she has written poetry, short stories and also painted. Now, her recent work is writing articles about art in Myanmar Magazine and Journal, as well as other international publications. Her work expanded beyond writing when she was introduced to video and film production through a program at the University of Finland, and also when she accepted a Diploma of Photography from Myanmar Photography Association. She is one of the very few women artists in Myanmar who currently works with digital photography and visual art. She is also the first female performance artist in Myanmar and has participated in several local and international exhibitions and festivals. She currently runs the Blue Wind Art project in Myanmar.

In her art, she presents the contentment and peace even of a hard life, the need for progress but at the same time the need to care for the environment. She is at present witnessing the cultural changes taking place in the urban areas through globalisation but she feels confident that the rural people, the true representatives of Myanmar, will not be overly swayed by western culture. Having struggled to break out of a restrictive and traditionalistic society, she knows how strong the culture’s values are. Her hope, presumed in her art, is that the best of these values will be kept intact for the sake of future generations. Phyu Mon has exhibited her works in Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore, Korea, Denmark, Spain, UK, France and the US.

Chan Aye and Phyu Mon will be undergoing a two month residency at Rimbun Dahan. For more information on their work, visit Chan Aye’s website, and Blue Wind Art’s website.