Dayang Sumbi: Menolak Status Quo

From Rimbun Dahan:

Arahmaiani has worked mainly in performance and installation art since the early 80s, she has gained an international reputation for her often provocative work. Her Indonesian roots, Western art training and humanist concerns has bought Arahmaiani to numerous exhibitions and performances, ranging from those held directly in streets protests in Indonesia, contemporary art museums in Asia, Europe and America, and notably to events as such as the pretigious 50th Venice Biennale 2003 and the "Breaking Words" Performance Art Expo in Nagano, Japan (2004). More recently, Arahmaini has been working on art and social projects in Kuala Lumpur and Germany.

For her first solo exhibition in Malaysia, Arahmaiani will use this private gallery as a platform to question the mechanisms and politics that govern the making and selling of art. As the artist aptly puts it "I am not against the market, but I hate market fundamentalism, exploitation, monopoly - market terrorism!" To express this delicate negotiation between her needs and personal journeys as an artist with the pressures of mass consumerism, the artist will present a series of painted diptychs and also give a performance.

"I want to turn the medium of painting into performance. I want to transform the individual 'product' of painting for the commercial art world into a complex question of authorship and its marketability."