On meta-commentaries as a method for dialogue
By Ho See Wah

A&M's Fresh Faces is where we profile an emerging artist from the region every month and speak to them about how they kick-started their career, how they continue to sustain their practice and what drives them as artists. Read our profile on Bandung artist Azizi Al Majid here.

Could you talk about your background? And at what point in your life did you decide to pursue a career in art?
I decided to pursue a career in art when I was in high school. At that time, I was living in Palembang, Sumatra, where contemporary art was underdeveloped, but I was fortunate enough to access information through art magazines and the internet. When the contemporary art boom took place in the 2010s, the local news focused on how the art market was growing significantly both nationally and regionally. Every article I read was about the high value of emerging and established artists in the market. I was surprised at how much paintings could sell for, and thought that it was a golden opportunity to be an artist.

In 2012, I left my hometown to study art in the Department of Fine Arts, Drawing studio at Bandung Institute of Technology (BIT). Ironically, the art boom that inspired me to pursue a career in this field suddenly ended, and the art world that I entered was very different. The quantity of exhibitions had declined, and no one was talking about the market anymore. As a result, my take toward this career was challenged and transformed. I realised that the idea of a contemporary art practice and the ecosystem at large had much to offer beyond its economic aspect.

Today, I am working as a part-time visual art teacher for secondary schools while continuing my practice in Bandung.

Could you share how you’ve maintained your practice after graduation? What are the important factors that kept you going?
After graduating in 2017, I sought out opportunities to build networks through internships, solo exhibitions and residencies. I also did this through ilubiung, a collective I was a part of.

One factor that kept me going was the opportunities offered through networking. When you connect into one network, many more possibilities emerge. Being part of a collective was also useful for me as a young artist, since we learned and worked together in the art scene.

Azizi Al Majid, ‘It Ain’t Five Minutes Yet!’, 2017, exhibition installation shot at OMNISPACE, Bandung. Image courtesy of the artist.

How did the opportunity for your early solo show, ‘Not all Who Wander Are Lost’ at Lir Space, Yogyakarta come about?
I interned at OMNISPACE, Bandung after BIT and was given the opportunity to present my first solo at the end of the internship. Titled ‘It Ain’t Five Minutes Yet!’, it was a site-specific drawing project. Around the same time, I heard about an open call by Lir Space, so I sent a proposal which had the same artistic approach but a different process. This proposal was accepted, so a few months later, I went to Jogja for three weeks to put up this exhibition.

Doing two solo exhibitions in just three months may sound crazy for a young artist who recently graduated, but if we think about it, a solo exhibition is not a grand project. Rather, it is a way to experiment with space, and a way to introduce yourself to the wider public. Additionally, I learned a lot about managing an exhibition.

What was the process like preparing for it?
I did everything alone for my show at OMNISPACE, from the publication and catalogue design to putting the artworks up. I did have some help for curatorial matters, as I asked my collective for their perspectives on my artistic and conceptual approaches.

‘It Ain’t Five Minutes Yet!’ was a major site-specific work. I was interested in creating an invasive drawing on the gallery wall that depicted puns, art-related commentary, witty words, scribbles and naive archetype drawings with crayon and oil pastel, media often associated with children’s drawings. This piece emphasised the relationship among the spatiality of the room, sporadic drawings and the presence of the audience. I thought it was intriguing for the viewers to be the ones that contextualised the content themselves, since they could choose and relate to whichever area they wanted to.

Azizi Al Majid, ‘Not All Who Wander Are Lost’, 2017, exhibition installation shot at Lir Space, Yogyakarta. Image courtesy of the artist.

‘Not All Who Wander Are Lost’ was a later development in my artistic approach. I was interested in the concepts of psychogeography and the flâneur from the Situationist International movement. Practically, psychogeography inherently resists narrow definitions as it emcompasses a diverse set of activities that raises awareness of the natural and cultural environment. It is attentive toward how the senses and emotions relate to place in ways that are often political and critical of the status quo, and is both serious and fun. Through my works, I seek these ideas through the perception of spatiality and my tendency of spontaneous drawing.

For this show, I challenged myself to investigate more deeply how my drawing can be more expansive, especially in the context of the art space and my presence in Yogyakarta. I examined the walking paths in the city, which became the form for my drawing in Lir Space. I plotted my routes for a week and walked as far as I could manage. During this time, I took notes, memorised routes, went through shortcuts, followed people and went with random prompts that would lead me toward other paths. Then, I started to draw alternative and imagined maps of the city based on my subjective experiences and decisions. I aimed to emancipate viewers from the “right way” as they could choose and guess where to start with this abstracted map. They could also read it from left or right, top or bottom, or even diagonally.

Azizi Al Majid, ‘Hotlinebling’ series, 2018, gouache and ink on acid free cotton paper, 60 x 40cm (each). Images courtesy of the artist.

You describe your artworks as a meta-commentary on contemporary art itself. This shines through in works such as your ‘Hotlinebling’ series and ‘Art Education: Comfortable with Ambiguity’. What inspired your interest in making such meta- commentaries about the art world?
My inspiration comes from the stacked information, arbitrary talks, and art world gossips all around me. The deeper I went into the art world and its social life, the more it became about the scene beyond artworks presented in galleries. Its activities are much more interesting for me, and my works are mostly commentaries about them. I consider them an institutional critique as they usually question the art world system and the absence of art —or jokes about it— in society.

Take for example the ‘Hotlinebling’ series, where I made a series of drawings by appropriating excerpts from several e-flux articles. They were collaged with scanned drawings by my lower primary students as well as random images such as memes.

‘Art Education: Comfortable with Ambiguity’, which comprises performance and an installation, was inspired by my experiences as an art teacher. For this work, I aimed to show how there is a wide gap in Indonesian art education. In formal schools, the focus is only on technical and pragmatic areas when the reality is that art today requires artists and curators to work in a much more conceptual and discursive way.

Azizi Al Majid, ‘Art Education: Comfortable with Ambiguity’, 2019 exhibition installation view at the Sixth Bandung Contemporary Art Award. Image courtesy of the artist.

As an art educator, how does your work as an educator inform your artistic concern and vice versa?
In 2017 before I started teaching officially, I worked on a project with my collective where we taught contemporary art in a public school for a month. At this point, I noticed that teaching is very much akin to performing.

After the project, I realised that there is little attention around the idea of contemporary art. In practice, it is important to view artistic and aesthetic discourse critically, whereas in public schools, art is seen as a recreational and unimportant subject.

In 2018, I started my job as a part-time visual art teacher for primary and secondary schools in Bandung. It dawned on me that we can actually introduce art as a bridge for interdisciplinary approaches in education. Thus, I would introduce art as a way for critical thinking, rather than pushing my students to make beautiful works.

“It dawned on me that we can actually introduce art as a bridge for interdisciplinary approaches in education. Thus, I would introduce art as a way for critical thinking, rather than pushing my students to make beautiful works.”

After becoming an educator, I became more aware of the importance of delivering knowledge to the audience through artistic production. How art can educate is sometimes overlooked, be it an artwork, a whole exhibition, discussions or presentations. We need to think of other ways to translate such production into something friendlier, as opposed to a curatorial framework that is linguistically confusing and uninteresting for the wider public.

Azizi in his studio. Image courtesy of the artist.

Who has been a mentor or an important artistic influence? And why?
There is no specific person. Mostly, I am influenced by the small talk, late night discussions and collective experiences that I have had with colleagues and fellow practitioners.

What was one important piece of advice you were given?
“We can't change the world, but you can make a corner of it pretty nice.” This is a piece of advice that I recieved from a colleague. I think it is always important to, first and foremost, work on the things around us.

Could you share your favourite art space or gallery in your country? Why are you drawn to that space and what does it offer to you/ your practice?
Artists-run ones such as OMNISPACE and Lir Space are some examples of my favourites. I like the idea of a space that is run by young practitioners, which aims to display fresh artists, ideas and dialogues. Their existence is a support system for the local art scene, as such communities are a melting pot for diverse people to meet.

What are your hopes for your own local art scene, and regionally as well?
I hope that locally, there will be more art spaces, initiatives and interdisciplinary communities. I would also like if contemporary art institutions were more connected with the public, and could be more contextual in its approaches.

More broadly, I hope that more awareness can be raised toward the potential of digital and web-based artworks, especially from our experiences of the ongoing pandemic. Also, it would be good if there could be more ways to learn about and access contemporary art. Real contemporary art should be made for all.

Are there any upcoming exhibitions/projects that you would like to share more information on?
I have an upcoming solo exhibition, tentatively titled ‘Pedagogy of Play’, at Ovo Galerie, Taipei in the first quarter of 2021. I am also preparing to make several zines and book projects next year.

Find out more about Aziz Amri’s practice at www.azizialmajid.com.