Kebun Raya, Kebun Saya takes its inspiration from the botanical gardens of Bali and Bogor, Indonesia. Geometric wall drawings—based on blueprint plans of the gardens are presented alongside archived materials and artefacts in a museum or salon-like display.
I wanted to explore the gardens as a place of botany and leisure, but also where colonisers of the past and the tourism of today play a vital role in its own exoticism and story—taming the wild, savage and raw with picture-postcard moments of a 'landscaped' Indonesia. Here nature becomes art, art becomes artifice, and artifice becomes narrative—categorised and contained, constructed and real.
I often call these installations, 'assemblages' where artefacts and art are displayed simultaneously—generating a dialogue between past and present; my identity with another; creating a new system of looking and a more subjective way of thinking.
Who decides what becomes preserved or destroyed? Like nature, can our knowledge and value systems mutate, adapt, evolve? Can we as Indonesians ever escape our colonial past?