Fusion Dialogue “Trade of Faith”
Deskripsi Karya
Kuswara is inspired by the local Kamasan paintings that traditionally decorate the island’s temples and the houses of the aristocracy. However, diverging from traditions, Kuswara inverts the narrative of heroism that is often the main subject to challenge the colonial history and cultural identity of Indonesia. The iconography of his prints leverages, in fact, on the depiction of colonial objects reinvented and misplaced into European settings, as well as historical figures such as Sir Stamford Raffles in conversation with local Indonesian characters. Most of the artist’s visual references are from the digital archives of the 18th and 19th century documents and material, which are reinterpreted by the cyanotype printing method. Literally meaning dark blue (kuáneos) and mark or impression (túpos), derived from ancient Greek, the cyanotype is a slow-reacting, photographic printing formulation sensitive to ultraviolet light. Now commonly called blueprint, the cyanotype was discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1842 and mostly used for the studies of specimens. In Kuswara’s work, the adoption of cyanotype as his medium on one hand relates to its function to record “the other” in colonial voyages, and on the other adopts the exposure to light as a way to transfer the digital data of the archival images back into an analogue form, alluding to the re-examination and exposure of historical truth.