ABOUT THE WORK

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A solo exhibition by Ardi Gunawan
Curated by Mitha Budhyarto

The pandemic caught us as we were working on Ardi's solo show, with the working title of Xenotropics Bioperversity. A couple of dates were set for its opening, but they were postponed due to restrictions and precautionary measures taken in regards to public gathering.

The central aim of the exhibition is to examine the natural world for their “queerness and repulsiveness” instead of “nobility or beauty” (Nicola Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, 2018). The term “xenotropics” refers to a tropical “otherness”, framed by the contexts of anti-naturalism and technological transformations. The method of perversion is here used to reimagine colonial renditions of “tropical paradise”, presenting nature in its sexualised, irrational and humorous forms.

The work departs from 19th century interpretations of the natural world, in particular its largely anthropocentric manner, so determined to “humanise” and thus tame the weirdness of nature. Central to such an approach is the positioning of nature as “resource”, which dominant narratives of environmentalism have tried to challenge with its “serious” advocacies of care and awareness.

Against this perspective, the work explores the possibility of presenting “bad environmentalism” with recourse to the Surrealist methods of absurdity and the grotesque. GIF was one of the chosen medium: the capitalist technology for cheap entertainment - commonly used to decorate social media “feeds”, much like emojis and “stickers” - is subverted by the proposition for its alternative use to discuss environmental emergencies.

In doing so, it reimagines 19th century ideals of a paradisal tropics that was projected onto the nusantara, presenting, instead, a hallucinatory view of animal and plant life from the archipelagos of colonised territories.