28 November - 20 December, 2023
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Holdings 2023, a group exhibition of selected works celebrating the exhibiting artists of 2023. We welcome you to our gallery stockroom for viewing.
Exhibiting Artists:
Andrew Browne
Angela Brennan
Dadang Christanto
David Fenoglio
Ian Friend
Jacinta Giles
Jonathan Kopinski
Joseph Daws
Kellie O’Dempsey
Miles Hall
Natalie Lavelle
Simon Degroot
2 - 20 May, 2023
Dadang Christanto, widely known for his works surrounding Indonesia’s 1965-66 genocide, returns to Jan Manton Gallery in his new exhibition LEGACY with a continued rigour and commitment to voicing the stories of the countless victims.
Christanto grew up in Tegal, Central Java where he lived with his family during the 1960s. When Christanto was 8 years old, his father was forcefully removed from his home in the middle of the night by a group of militants. He was never to be seen or heard from again. The events of 1965-66 motivated Christanto’s art practice as a way to not only express his pain caused by the atrocities but to share stories of suffering.
In his new body of work, Christanto illustrates violent acts of mass murder, with severed heads seen crashing into bodies of water and limbs sinking further below. ‘Plung’, the title of 3 works, is an Indonesian onomatopoeia to describe the sound made when an object drops into water. “It is a poetic word which carries a quietness - a sound you may hear in the night,” says Christanto. “Violence is a reality in our lives and is an inherent part of human nature. Whether we like it or not, we must be brave enough to oppose violence.” Alongside the ‘Plung’ series is the artist’s self-portrait ‘One Day in K’, which provides a glimpse into his life amidst the COVID pandemic. The increased isolation experienced by Christanto inflicted a deep sense of longing for another place, specifically the Yangtze River in China.
The exhibition’s titular piece ‘Legacy’ was previously shown in a 2007 exhibition in Jan Manton Gallery where it was formerly titled ‘Such a Beautiful Morning, The Sun Rose and Its Light Did Stab in the Back’. Since its first showing, the work has undergone the addition of new layers with the last being a caricature of Indonesia’s past leader Suharto. Christanto’s intent to revisit the large-scale work was prompted by the first layer’s portrayal of the mass casualties caused by the 2004 Indian earthquake and tsunami, which devastated the west coast of northern Sumatra. “Tsunamis are a natural disaster and by adding these new layers, I wanted to show there also exists ideological and social disasters,” states Christanto.
LEGACY acknowledges that although the artist has healed from personal wounds, issues of socio-political injustice and discrimination within Indonesia remain unresolved.
Exhibiting artist Dadang Christanto joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘Memory and Forgetting' in LEGACY (2 - 20 May).
6 - 27 April 2019
This series Ciduk, Siska, Bunuh, Buang, translated into English as “capture, torture, kill, throw”, honours the countless victims of political violence and crimes against humanity. This sincerity and rawness of emotion portrayed in his works stem from his personal narrative, which he has subtly woven into every aspect of his art. References to the year 1965 appear again and again. Christanto’s own father was dragged from their home by soldiers, never to be seen or heard from again.
Throughout his search to discover the truth of what happened to his father, Christanto heard of a news photographer who had been able to access photographs of those tortured between 1965-66 in Tegel.
6 - 30 September, 2017
Dadang Christanto is a family victim of the Indonesian Genocide and Massacres of 1965-66. The mass killings saw an anti-communist purge, targeting alleged leftists including ethnic Chinese, often at the instigation of the military and the government. Conservative estimates place the number killed at between 500,000 and 1 million, with some recent estimates reporting 2 to 3 million people killed.
Dadang’s father was one of the millions killed. The impact of this horror has informed Dadang’s art making from his student days, through to his current exhibition, ‘Painted Black on Their Faces’. Along with Dadang’s personal loss is the burden he carries of the personal stories of so many others.
This is the ‘narrative of genocide’ explains Dadang. The many stories that people have had to keep and live with other the decades. His friend remembers seeing bodies floating in the river, some with their faces painted with black tar. Was this to disguise their identity? No one knows and there is no way to know. To this day the Indonesian government is reluctant to acknowledge these massacres. It is not taught in schools, has been written out of history textbooks and received little introspection from Indonesians themselves.
As a generation ages and dies there is real possibility that the narrative will be forgotten and history rewritten. For Dadang he can never forget, although he does say he forgives. He will return to this theme again and again, his wish is to bear witness to this darkest time in Indonesian history.
18 November - 19 December, 2015
In this new series of paintings Dadang Christanto continues his collaboration with the master craftsman of East Java using the traditional paintings of the Wuku, or Javanese zodiac.
The Wuku can be mapped using a complex table of references where animals and elements from nature combine for each day of the year. With the intrusion of Western culture on traditional life, Christanto is concerned that the application of skills to the zodiac tradition are being lost. It is his hope, that through exhibiting to a wider audience, a greater understanding and appreciation of this ancient tradition will be recognized and its importance upheld for future generations.
