We Move Amongst Ghosts* at the Museum of Fine Arts and Ceramics in Jakarta...
“We Move Amongst Ghosts” recently opened at the Museum of Fine Arts and Ceramics in Jakarta, Indonesia. This is Lucie Fontaine’s eleventh project and the first in a series of group exhibitions in collaboration with YMMJ. The series, showcasing artists from Indonesia and abroad, will be held at a selection of Jakarta museums and is their inaugural show, includes works by Arahmaiani, Ashley Bickerton, Chris Bunjamin, Marco Cassani, Rafram Chaddad, Cian Dayrit, Fendry Ekel, J. W. Heydt, Agnieszka Kurant, Goshka Macuga, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
*The title is taken from the article “We Move Amongst Ghosts” by British artist Laura Grace Ford. The article introduces her book, Savage Messiah (Verso Books, 2019), which gathers together a complete set of the artist’s fanzines to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the urban working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up within an urban context.
The show looks at the interface between object and space on the one hand, and memory on the other. In particular, they have focused on how objects and spaces conjure historical and communal memories. This underlying idea harks back to Kayu’s fifth project in 2016, “Ritiro,” in which a group of artworks ‘went’ on a retreat from Bali to Java, thus suggesting the idea that space and object, things without life in themselves, might have a kind of existence – an internal life – of their own....