Mella Jaarsma reveals her ongoing exploration of social identities through four elaborately constructed costumes in ‘Animals Have No Religion’ modeled live during the opening of Absence. Her silent but visually rich sentinels lure and hypnotize viewers to interrogate methods of reassurance encouraged by religion and ritual. Through a characteristically complex system of objects, material and meaning she activates and questions the need for protection in a fragile world as well humanity’s relationships to animals and ancient rituals. Inspired by the religious context of the Philippines observed during her month long residency with Manila Contemporary Jaarsma interrogates and reconfigures the cultural idioms and assumptions around her to create powerful performative presences in the gallery.
Audiences are a pivotal concern for Jaarsma, who as a Dutch national, has functioned as an insider/outsider in her adopted home of Yogyakarta for the past 30 years. These notions of distance and intimacy, of the individual and community from a general and autobiographical approach hint at how Jaarsma has negotiated her own position from foreigner to adopted local in Indonesia. Exploring ideologies around identity as a performed and shifting concept she meticulously creates elaborate sculptural costumes made from a variety of organic and man made materials that look at notions of entrapment, refuge and contemplation.
Animals Have No Religion Series I use black coral or akar bahar as it is called in Bahasa Indonesia to produce an intricate construct for spiritual questioning. Black coral, the skeleton of a type of coral found in shallow waters in the tropical waters of Indonesia and the Philippines has been traditionally used by fishermen to ward off evil spirits. Jaarsma’s costume attaches multiple long and undulating pieces onto utility belts to create an entangled shield for her barechested models. Her black tendrils were bought outside the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene or Quiapo Church in Quiapo and in this instance are re-visioned to act as a type of conduit not to repel but receive and transmit energies from the heavens, further emphasized by her inclusion of satellite dishes and radio antenna. This talismanic ritual is not a specific quote from a particular religion but rather evolving out of ancient human histories that revered natural and animal spirits.
Animals Have No Religion Series II develops this concept even further by presenting curious human-animal entities. Sensual red leather has been meticulously sewn together with very long voluminous sleeves. However instead of arms, surreal wooden feet emerge giving the appearance of four legs. Bringing her characters back down to earth Jaarsma reveals the ancient practice of Animism or animal worship by numerous early human cultures. Presenting a type of devolution or merging with animals she provokes audiences to question primitive beliefs that are now in stark contrast to the superiority of humanity as espoused through organized religion.
During the opening night of Absence, Jaarsma’s four costumes were activated with human models. The artist herself also performed and coordinated silent posturing and curious interactions with audiences. Light and shadow (a continuing fascination for the artist) also featured where Jaarsma slowly revealed through the removal and consuming shadows of animal shapes projected onto a panel behind her work. Made out of pieces of dried mango that covered the entire plate of the overhead projector at the beginning of the performance it was only through their removal and consumption by the artist herself and those offered to audiences that their shapes were revealed. By eating these beasts Jaarsma questions the animal nature inside all of us whilst her silent figures slowly moved and waited in the gallery. The strength of Jaarsmaâs work is in the various exchanges and transferences that takes place both during and after her performances. Her performers become both objects and protagonists, symbols and provocateurs. A combination of their human physicality and Jaarsma’s constructed artifices connects us to intangible human emotions and anxieties about wild and uncivilized times as her figures move in and out of audiences who choose to engage or ignore them. During the exhibition, only the costumes remain as silent reminders of the performance itself. Without their human counterparts, they become traces from a specific time and timelessness or a residue of Jaarsma’s exploration of the confluence of material and immaterial ideas and objects.
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