In the span of almost four decades, Anusapati has emerged as a leading contemporary artist who utilizes leftover wood materials for his works. This tendency was shown when he returned from his study in the United States. His sculptures immediately abandoned the abstract language of modern sculpture – distorted figures/forms fixed on supports. In the early 1990s, Anusapati began to look to the traditional environment and the form of tools that symbolize the human familiarity with nature. He eliminated the strict trichotomy between tree/wood/tools in all his sculptures and installations. At that time, there was also a rise in the tendency of vernacular language among contemporary artists in Southeast Asia which gave birth to a diversity of postmodern aesthetics.

Two main issues emerge in the complex approach between the presence of sculpture/tools/materiality/nature in Anusapati’s works. The first is the global environmental crisis due to the massive exploitation of natural resources such as forests and mines. The second is a deep concern to link art/aesthetic practices with ecological awareness regarding the oikos or universal household in which humans live. The aesthetic path taken by Anusapati is ‘sculpture after sculpture art’. Secret of Eden here marks a very thin, almost invisible separation between life, art and nature.

If technology and modernity separate humans from nature, Anusapati uses tree trunks and dead roots to ‘redeem’ it, breaking through those barriers and boundaries. This artist integrates these two main issues which precisely imply the wisdom of nature’s autopoiesis itself: the ability to manage, regenerate and organize itself. Nature is a very complex network of life that flows its waste as endless energy for other lives. Anusapati’s practice revives sensus ecologicus in the fine art environment by utilizing tree/wood waste as the main material for his work.

Anusapati Audio Performance Work Concept

Tony Maryana - Born in Bandung 1978, educated at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta. Music major, with an interest in Musicology with a focus on percussion.

Tony Maryana, recording artist, composer, electronic musician, percussionist and musicologist Tony Maryana is based in Yogyakarta, the center of the arts in Indonesia. A graduate of Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI), Yogyakarta, he has worked on several sound installations and performances with musicians from around the world. He has written, recorded and adapted compositions with artists ranging from singers to percussionists to saxophonists. Maryana is a member of Total Percussion, a community dedicated to percussionists and cultural practices related to percussion. She has performed both collaboratively and solo in various editions of Yogyakarta Nelson Composer Workshop (New Zealand) Contemporary Music Festival, Pekan Komponis, October Meeting Festival. Asian music Meeting (Taiwan), AND Festival (Liverpool), FCAC (Melbourne), Japanese sound installation works (UENO) and has worked extensively as a musician and composer.

In his dialogue with Anusapati's work —Tony Maryana brings an auditive dimension to the landscape of old trees whose roots penetrate the upper floors of the building. An old lorry and a damp, empty space create a dystopian atmosphere. Between the enclosed space and between the roots and trees, there are sounds of earth, wood, insects, metal, water, wind and more. These everyday sounds are random fragments of sonic memory. This sonic memory both composes itself and disrupts itself, just like the sounds of nature around us.

This sound work explores the soundscape —geophony, anthropophony and biophony— bridging the visual idiom of Anusapati's tree/wood. Tony's work concocts sounds through live recording and composes cryptic fractal compositions through electronic audio synthesis techniques that enable the creation of new cognitive patterns for the auditory. The sounds here are not designed to materialize as ‘illustrations’ for those of us present, but rather become themselves in the space of individual perception. Reflectively, unfamiliar and uncertain. In the space where the performing artist's work is displayed, the medium of sound is presented through spatialized multichannel speakers.

Bangun/Wake Up
Akusmatik Multichannel sound-work : Tony Maryana
Audio Spatialization : Gatot Danar Sulistiyanto
Audio System Designer : Bayu Prasetyo
Technical Partner : Rekambergerak