Westbund Art & Design 2017

Algorithms are becoming increasingly complex, its definition becoming vast in tandem and parallel to time. Utilizing the search engine as permutation of an algorithm then, Novali looks towards himself through this vast trove of information. Typing his own name into the tab results in interesting findings through various changes in inputs. Who is the Aditya Novali that exists on http:// and what does this generated information have to do in relation to reality?

In fact, what does identity even mean in relation to the truths, half-truths, non-truths that exist in the form of electronic memory?

Pastrana completed a short-residency in Bandung, Indonesia in June 2017, during which he met and consulted with Syaiful Garibaldi, resulting in one particular work that was presented in his solo exhibition clock map knife mirrors. In Conversation, playing at intervals on both screens are documentations of Pastrana’s search for earthworms at a certain yard in his own place of residency, images of texts of the artist’s personal musings or questions about his own process, as well images of texts that seem to be answers to his own questions.

These are interviews with the self, so to speak. What had started as a certain fascination on the image of conjoining and splitting worms have become a staged search for these agents of cohesion and divisibility.

Syaiful Garibaldi’s newer body of works provides a glimpse into a number of Garibaldi’s different aesthetic interests, with a particular concentration in this case to human flesh and its decomposition. The decomposition of human flesh is commonly associated with negative connotations, especially with notions related to death. It is these kinds of preconceived notions, however, that Garibaldi often looks back upon and re-contextualizes.

It is, in fact, through decomposition that Garibaldi instead observes a sense of reincarnation, or restoration of matter, into different forms of life.

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