ROH is pleased to present Water Resistance, a solo exhibition by artist, curator and director of ruangrupa, Ade Darmawan. The exhibition unfolds Darmawan’s continued research into the practice of distillation as visual analogy for the multiple histories of extraction in colonial Indonesia, which continue to reverberate in attitudes to nature and art-making in the present. 

As a variant of extraction, purifying a substance in its liquid phase, distillation in a sense is an essentialization. For a long time—in a European genealogy of modernity—purifying, essentializing, distilling and extracting were considered fundamental to the production of culture, if we were to define culture as an adaptation of natural resources toward human ends. Darmawan’s installation encompasses both process and product, neither of which is above politics. Poignantly he creates a dispositive to stage this paradigm of a specific cultural history which was enforced on the world and is highly problematic. His installation unpicks the thinking behind colonialism which often used monotheistic theology to embark on a disenchantment of the world and legitimize conquest, and the desire to control nature and the (indigenous) people living in and with the world. 

The works in the exhibition result from research that Darmawan started a couple of years ago, after reading Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel Arus Balik, narrating the implication of histories and politics in processes of colonization and shifts in maritime power in the sixteenth century for people and ports across the regions then called ‘below’ (the Straits of Malacca, South China Sea, Java Sea, and further east) and ‘above’ (the Indian Ocean and further west) the wind. As a starting point for his installation, Darmawan carefully studied Arus Balik with special attention to how different characters in the book use natural resources. Later, he undertook several field trips to Tuban, a city in East Java which plays a central role in the book, and to the nearby town of Bojonegoro, a major producer of teakwood and tobacco, which more recently became known as the location of the discovery of the biggest oil reserve in Indonesia. Both cities are not far from Blora, the birthplace of Toer. 

The literal translation of ‘Arus Balik’ from Bahasa Indonesia would be “the reversal of the tide”, referring to the reversal of Java’s position in the world in the sixteenth century, from actively sailing out to remaining inactive and receiving others - colonizers. But Toer’s reversal of the current also involves another reversal, a meta-geographical impulse that is comparable to the notion of the “inverted telescope” that Benedict Anderson advances in his seminal book The Spectre of Comparisons. The promise of another reversal is implicit. In a new series of AI text-to-image generated photographs, Darmawan creates images of colonial history that never existed, a gaze directed from textual description, as another way to re-enact the violent past through images as a form of self-subversion. Our crisis, Darmawan affirms in these images, which seem plausible but carry a whiff of absurdity, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. This crisis comes with the cultural conundrum that we are faced with: the challenge of how to think about and work through the profound links between art-making and extractivism. Darmawan’s distillation factory reminds us that art in its very techniques uses extraction, to transform agents of an ecosystem into ‘resources’ entering what in language would be cynically called another ‘life cycle’ subjected to processes and tasked with new functions. 

Copyright belongs to The Artist

Text by Philippe Pirotte

Courtesy of The Artist and ROH