The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

As a photographer in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Edwin ‘Dolly’ Roseno is concerned with the convergence of the rural, urban and global in daily life. Past photographic projects focus on the interplay between people, context and signs (often literally) and document his local environment. In his ‘Green hypermarket’ series 2011–12, Roseno diverges from observation and takes on a more active role developing a modest relational-project-cum-large-scale image bank. Basic human needs — eating and drinking — are its starting point; from there, broader ideas relating to ecology and environmental responsibility grow. In the artist’s own words: The most basic human need in the pyramid of needs is to eat. Basically . . . to survive one needs to eat and drink . . . Fast population growth means a greater demand for food. Large-scale food revolution has impacted on land degradation; agricultural and livestock development do not have the principles of sustainable development. 1 For ‘Green hypermarket’, Roseno marries consumer waste with plant life, borrowing plants from neighbours and a local nursery and replanting them in old cans, bottles, jars and containers. The project connects the artist with his local community, connecting them with contemporary art. APT7 visitors encounter a mass of circular photographs — taken in the artist’s studio in Yogyakarta and printed and mounted on aluminium in Brisbane — presented with the slickness of an advertising campaign. In each photograph, Roseno creates a visual synergy between the manufactured and natural: . . . what attracted me to the containers is the global icons attached to them: Campbell’s Soup, Absolut Vodka and so forth. Then I try to find the right combination. For example, I always think that an Aglaonema flower suits the Absolut Vodka bottle. 2 Roseno describes the project as a way of finding new beauty, but our gaze is instinctively drawn to the branding. In contemporary culture the advertising system of signs visually dominates — it is designed to. Roseno clearly considers matching proportion, colour and density, while some of his combinations provoke deeper ruminations on the origin and history of his mated plants and products. For example, the image of a bound plant springing from a Coke can, bearing the slogan ‘125 years of making new friends’, has strange and sinister neo-liberal connotations. Prepackaged foods are among globalisation’s most convenient symbols. Often owned by big multinationals, transcultural foodstuffs can be grown and sold, shipped off for processing, sent back again for sale, while company dividends are redistributed to shareholders worldwide. Some brands in ‘Green hypermarket’ have complex colonial histories: Ayam was started by a Frenchman in Singapore (which at the time was part of British Malaya) and is one of the most recognisable brands in Asia today. Western brand dominance gains extra symbolic currency in the context of a regionally specific exhibition like the APT, while items such as Serena egg rolls and Mili longans, less familiar outside of Indonesia, offer insights into local culinary tastes. Outside these references to global contemporary life, and the obvious connection to Warhol’s soup cans and Pop art, Roseno’s use of branding and packaging speaks to the history of the Indonesian New Art Movement, founded by artists from Bandung and Yogyakarta in the 1970s. 3 In his writing on this period, Jim Supangkat, eminent curator and one of the movement’s founders, remembers: Magazines, printed materials, photographs, billboards, and advertisements appeared almost out of nowhere, stimulating visual sensation and affecting people’s sensorial faculties . . . In the midst of this condition, a few young painters in Yogyakarta underwent some shock, facing a changing visual reality . . . Like the teenagers, these young artists collected cuttings of magazine covers, advertising pictures, T-shirts, photographs and posters. And in this situation emerged the idea to use this collection to create new things. 4 While four decades may have passed since then, ‘Green hypermarket’ shows us that this subject matter is still enticing for young artists in Yogyakarta. Roseno’s rubbish selection is part of a global trend in which the detritus of contemporary living and throw-away culture is reappearing in contemporary art. Curator Nicholas Chambers suggests that in times of economic downturn and rising environmental concerns, ‘cheap, improvised and contingent forms prove adept vehicles for addressing the complexity, speed and contradictions of contemporary life’. 5 Presented en masse, the wall garden of 150 images in ‘Green hypermarket’ displays the remnants of industrial food production as art spectacle, suggesting a metaphorical link between production and consumption cycles, and the political and economic circuits of contemporary art. Importantly, however, the project also represents the idea of the natural world overcoming a post-consumer environment. Zoe De Luca 1 Artist statement 2011 (translated). 2 Edwin Roseno, email to the author, September 2012. 3 The New Art Movement encouraged socio-politically driven work and exhibitions in response to President Suharto’s liberal-militaristic New Order regime and is generally cited as the starting point for contemporary art in Indonesia. 4 Jim Supangkat, ‘Indonesia in contemporary art discourses’, in Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art in Indonesia [exhibition catalogue], Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2010, p.33. 5 Nicholas Chambers, ‘21st century recession art’, in 21st Century: Art in the First Decade [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2012, p.45. EDWIN ROSENO ‘Green hypermarket’ unpacked 187