The Eko Chamber – Recent Works by Eko Nugroho

Solo Exhibition
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
18/11/2011 - 29/01/2012

The works included in The Eko Chamber epitomize the eclectic nature of Nugroho’s practice which is influenced as much by wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre) as comic books and graffiti on the streets of his hometown of Yogyakarta. Eko Nugroho’s work evokes a sense of play while simultaneously confronting the challenges of contemporary life in his country. This is best illustrated by his polychromatic embroidered works from 2011 which combine hybrid cartoon creatures depicted in day-glo colours and slogans in Indonesian.


Included in the The Eko Chamber is Invasions, first exhibited in 2009 in Beyond the Dutch at the Centraal Museum, Utrecth, Netherlands. While Invasions includes a wide range of iconographic staples of Nugroho’s visual vocabulary, such as masked heads and truncated robotic limbs, the absence of colour and the title of the work reference the Dutch colonization of Indonesia and the unaddressed trauma of this history which Nugroho believes continue to haunt his society. (Text source: Art Gallery of South Australia)

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