A work by Mella Jaarsma for Artjog 2023
Mella Jaarsma was born in 1960 in Emmeloord, Netherlands. She studied visual arts at Minerva Academy of Visual Arts, Groningen, Netherlands (1978-1984), Jakarta Art Institute (1984), and Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta (1985-1986). She resides in Yogyakarta.
Three main motifs that have caught Mella Jaarsma’s attention in her artistic journey over the past four decades are shadows, veils, and the relationship between the body and living space. These three motifs mark the period of Mella’s artistic development after she set foot in Indonesia in 1984.
The shadow motif brings Mella closer to exploring themes between the material and immaterial, real or illusionaryl, life and death, existence or non-existence. The motif of veiling can be interpreted as an exploration of the wide range of themes of identity in Mella’s subsequent works. During this period, Mella increasingly felt herself no longer just as an observer, an outsider, or the other, but an artist willing to engage in the socio-political dynamics of the society she lived in. As she ventured further into different places, she produced numerous installation works and performance objects under the theme of protection and displacement. The themes of political and cultural identity, gender relations, the dialectic between the facade/building/protector and content/occupancy/predator, and private/public space are executed in various vernacular ways that emphasize its rich material aspects. The back-and-forth gaze between the subject and the subject through the gaps or in-between-space implies an experience of the limbus, ironically which she once sharply termed “londo ngemis” (the begging foreigner) and “ngemis londo” (begging the foreigner). For Mella, these art practices are a critical view of an artist through various lenses: anthropological, historical, and colonial.
This second motif, veiling, intersects with the third motif, which is her attention to the relationship between body and residential space in traditional architecture. Anthropometry in local architecture carries a deep meaning regarding the presence of the human body that inhabits it; symbolism is related to measuring the human body—height, fathom, cubits, shoulder, arms, hand, finger, foot, step, and so on. Mella’s long attention to the form of a house/limasan (a traditional Javanese house) in Java shows this concrete relationship. Since its establishment in 1999, Cemeti Art House has even put limasan in the front area as a gathering place, a space for physical encounters between the visitor or guest and resident or host. However, limasan for Mella is also a representation of the outskirts when the mobility of bodies is increasingly pushing its territory and autonomy, the movement of people, the spread of space in various global cultural transformations that happen everywhere when people still need to be present with their bodies and its various veils. Mella Jaarsma’s works as a commissioned artist of ARTJOG 2023 present the incision of her artistic journey through the selection of her works from 2000 to 2023.