Occupied

I’ve been back from Indonesia (central Java) for about a week and a half now and I’m finally getting back into the swing of things. I had internet access at times in Indonesia but I was too engrossed in what I was doing to bother blogging so sorry for the wait (don’t suppose you were anyway). I’ve processed some of the photos I’ve taken of the Yogya Biennale as the start of a series of galleries from my trip. I was only able to see a small part of the Biennale but what I saw was fresh, fun and exciting. Grass-roots art that engaged the local community and the visitor a-like. I was very lucky to be in Yogyakarta at the time of the Biennale because not only did I get to see a lot of interesting artwork I also saw inside a few of Yogya’s colonial buildings that are not regularly open to the public as they were being used as gallery space. Another endearing feature of the Biennale was that the vast majority of it (certainly all I saw) was free – bare in mind that going to the toilet in Indonesia can cost you a few thousand Rupiah.

The Justice Goddess

Don't play with Matches!

In the gallery (link removed) you’ll see a few of the works I was most taken with. There’s a toilet on a very high pipe with a knot in it which, my good friend Agus told me, is a protest about the lack / condition of  public toilets in Yogyakarta. Agus was filming a documentary about the artist, Eddi Prabandono, while we were there. Another stunning sculpture which Agus called the “Justice Goddess” stood in the middle of a major intersection and an enormous box of matches positioned outside a petrol station which caught my eye as we passed by on a local bus and cased me to laugh out loud to the bemusement of the other passengers.

Some of these images represent my first attempts at HDR photography. So far I’m very please with the dramatic effects I’m getting.