The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989

Group Exhibition
ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany

Curators:

Andrea Buddensieg, Peter Weibel

Co-curators:

Jacob Birken, Antonia Marten


Curatorial committee:

N’Goné Fall, Patrick D. Flores, Carol Lu, Jim Supangkat
17/09/2011 - 19/02/2012

Eko Nugroho spent one month in the city of Karlsruhe from August the 2nd to September the 1st 2011 in the artist-in-residence program together with 10 other international artists, prior to the exhibition opening The Global Contemporary. During his stay he continued to explore the dimensions of modern life in urban areas informed by his background in street art from the cultural city of Yogyakarta. He looks particularly at the situation of elderly people as a social class often excluded from the society, and other various symbolic facets of the architectural encounter. Departing from a tourist’s glance, Nugroho uses it as a vehicle for perception, gaining new insights of the cityscapes through the eyes of the visitor.


The sketches and drawings produced during the residency stand as preliminary media in the daily encounter with the city, culminating in the site-specific work Alien Nation, an over-sized mural of 12x24m of acrylic paint, and printed textile banners. A man-machine on crutches and a masked duke, a pyramid-formed octopus and a sign with the laconic imprint “creamy crisis” – all this is depicted in the mural work through which Eko Nugroho shows us about his perspective of life and the everyday in Karlsruhe. Essentially, the work questions the difficulty to pinpoint what is truly “local” reinforcing the tendency of a tourist eye in the circulation of global art today. (Text source: ZKM Center for Art and Media)

Alien Nation
Wall painting with emulsion paint, printed textile banners
12x24m
2011

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