Taring Padi

22 August - 3 October      Solidaritas

Link to the Collective

SLOT shares Taring Padi’s ethos. Like them our venue is the street. Our audience is the people who pass us there. And we share their ambition, to hijack your eyes and twist your brain.

Taring Padi is a loose collective of artists who formed during the late 1990’s in the highly politicised contemporary art world of Yogyakarta, the traditional heartland of Javanese culture. Central to their project is a strident opposition to the idea of art for art’s sake that they codified in their “5 evils of culture”. Here they identified the absurdity of government funded and therefore sanctioned, socially progressive art forms that purport to be critical of social norms. In contrast, the views of Taring Padi embrace the struggle of the worker in their artfully expressive political posters, made as un-editioned and unsigned woodblock prints that range in size from the modest examples exhibited here to billboard size. The artist is of no consequence here – the message is the single issue. Rather than lift a context free translation of these works from Google translate, SLOT offers a photograph of work with similar sensibility that is pasted on the building across the road. The struggle for social equity is universal, although given different names in different places. In these works by Taring Padi social evil is defined as the patriarchy.  It robs both men and women of their freedom, their labour and their sexuality. These Taring Padi prints were made in the first few years of this century. And in them I can't help noticing the plumes of smoke billowing from chimney-stacks. They seem to offer a sub-text to the various subjects of the works. Should those plumes be read as an expression of industrial modernity as they might have been in the 19th century or a cruel 21st century legacy of the patriarchy? Industrialists guilty of their workers rape first and our environment simultaneously. Tony Twigg