Artist in Residence #2

Abshar Platisza, born in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1992, graduated in printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts at ITB (Bandung-Indonesia). He has exhibited his work in Indonesia and Singapore and was a participant in ARTJOG 2014. He was a finalist in SPOT ART 2013 and received the prestigious Panorama Indonesia Finalist Award from the National Gallery in Jakarta.

Platisza's project centers on vernacular photography albums he discovered at thrift shops in Yogyakarta. These photographs capture the daily lives and activities of people in Southern Yogyakarta, serving as a foundation for his exploration of their social and cultural contexts through further artistic experimentation. The stagnation of subjects in these photographs, from the 1970s to the present, highlights a friction in the relationship between people and the Opak River, which flows from the North to the South of Yogyakarta.

During his two-month residency at the Foundation, Platisza engaged with the artistic environment of the city by visiting art spaces and learning bio-art techniques from the HONFablab art collective, as well as researching vernacular photography at the Archive Council in Yogyakarta. Additionally, the location of REDBASE Foundation in Bangunharjo village, Bantul, prompted him to investigate traditional activities of local farmers, such as rice planting and plowing, revealing a friction that challenges notions of time, reality, and space.