Jumaadi: Home Sweet Home Home is not Sweet Home

2 August – 13 September 2008

Jumaadi‘s work retells stories based on personal memory and the folkloric tradition in the form of drawings, paintings, performance, weaving and installation. His exhibition, Home Sweet Home Home is not Sweet Home, is based on the human-induced mud-flow disaster in the Sidoarjo region of the artist’s native East Java.

InHome Sweet Home Home is not Sweet Home, the artist uses a mix of sculpture, photographs as well as multi-panel drawings and paintings to present a poetic encounter with the individual tragedies resulting from the mudflow disaster. The artist is known for his multi-panel work, which bring together micro-stories and events to form a larger narrative.

“Each figure takes a place within the space to create a story. Here I can hide and seek, confess and deny or tell you something about my father, my mother or about those villages buried by mud, robbed of their memories and history. Like a little bird, I pick up some of those stories and memories and give them another chance to live within my own story.” – Jumaadi

Mud began erupting from the ground in Sidoarjo in 2006 and continues unabated to this day, washing away the homes, schools, places of worship, paddy fields and factories. The disaster has been blamed on the mining work undertaken by a private gas and oil company and is also said to have been triggered by the strong earthquake in Yogyakarta and Central Java earlier that year. Jumaadi’s exhibition Home Sweet Home Home is not Sweet Home will be a heartfelt and evocative elegy to lament this incident. It will be accompanied by an artist book with photographs by Jumaadi and text by Javanese poet Triyanto Triwikromo, available for purchase at Gallery 4A. The artist will officially open the exhibition with a story-telling performance.

Jumaadi was born in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia in 1973. He has been living in Sydney since 1996 where he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School and is currently a Masters of Fine Arts candidate. Winner of the John Coburn Art Prize for Emerging Artists as part of the Blake Art Prize, the artist is currently represented by Legge Gallery, where he has been exhibited numerous times. He has had solo exhibitions in the French Cultural Centre, Surabaya, Indonesia, and Mura Clay Gallery, Sydney and has exhibited in various group exhibitions internationally and nationally.