Photographs and altered memories

Art is forever fluctuating. Our definition of art is unstable as the Rock of Gibraltar poised on top of a bowling ball. Genres merge in artistic coitus. And the action never stops.
It is no wonder since artists consider frontiers and categorization as air-conditioned cages for pigs. Feelings after all have always been ambiguous. Life is clear as mud. Art and life are dogs of the same collar.

The Goethe Institute has undertaken one big art platform called Art ConneXions. Nine artists from Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, plus nine German artists have been invited to "jointly explore contemporary manifestations of and tensions between all sorts of phenomena in the region." The idea is for the artists to interact, to react to each other’s art. The themes include "people on the move" (migrants, students, traders, boat people, expatriates, coolies, artists, traffickers and tourists), "objects on the move" (commodities, fuels, food stuffs, shoes, drugs, cargoes and money), and "images and ideas on the move" (education, technologies, architecture, design, fashion, music, arts, movies and memories).

The artistic medium employed for the project is called "photomedia," which incorporates photographic techniques used in collages, graphic design, video stills, etc. The form mirrors the content since the artists explore contemporary manifestations of "connecting, mixing, linkage versus isolation, reassertion, identity and reaction." Just like Keith Haring creating yellow and orange graffiti to depict vitality and unity in the dank subway walls of New York City, or Trent Reznor creating a jagged, industrial symphony about pigs marching in mud. Form follows content.

The project works thusly: Local artists, along with counterparts in the region and from Germany, will engage in each of the nine cities (Jakarta-Bangkok-Auckland, Singapore-Melbourne-Hanoi, and Sydney-Manila-Kuala Lumpur) in a combined residency, art production and exhibition program. The artists will create "an assemblage of localized artistic reactions that would travel to a specific location and then enriched there before moving to another location."

In the Philippines, Goethe Institut-Manila led by Volker Avenmarg welcomed artist Yee I-Lann of Malaysia and German artist Martin Fengel for the Art ConneXions project. Yee explored the nature of identity and exclusion in Malaysian society using subtle and yet humorously altered photographic images.

The interactive pieces will then be presented in two cities in Southeast Asia, one city in Australia or New Zealand, and then finally in Germany.

Consider it art as a living, growing project. It’s like an empty canvas journeying around the world and being rid of the emptiness by artists.