ISCP Talk
March 3, 2020, 6:30–8pm
LIR at ISCP with Mella Jaarsma
Artist Mella Jaarsma, who is participating in ISCP’s current exhibition Transient Museum of a Thousand Conversations: LIR at ISCP, will speak about the challenges of creating site-specific projects in other countries, with other cultures and new publics. She will also present her project featured at ISCP, The Right Shot (2019), which takes as its starting point a hostel in Kaliurang, Indonesia. The performance is based on the time she spent there after she left The Netherlands in the 1980s. In the spirit of this time, the performance activates the audience’s sense of heat and cold, much like the hot weather that the Dutch escaped in their second homes in Kaliurang.
Mella Jaarsma has become known for her complex costume installations and her focus on forms of cultural and racial diversity embedded within clothing, the body and food. She was born in The Netherlands in 1960 and studied visual art at Minerva Academy in Groningen, after which she left The Netherlands to study at the Art Institute of Jakarta and at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta. She has lived and worked in Indonesia ever since. In 1988, she co-founded Cemeti Art House, now called Cemeti Institute for Art and Society with Nindityo Adipurnomo, one of the first spaces for contemporary art in Indonesia, which to this day remains an important platform for young artists and art workers in the country and region.
This program is supported, in part, by Hartfield Foundation; New York City Council Member for the 33rd District Stephen T. Levin; New York City Council Member for the 34th District Antonio Reynoso; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF); The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
