“Your Fingerprints Are Mine”, New Media Installation By Tintin Wulia At “Sub/Version”, Ruangrupa’s OK_Video – Jakarta Video Festival 2005, National Gallery Of Indonesia, 17-31 July 2005
Melbourne, 24 July 2005
The second bi-annual festival organized by the Indonesian artists’ initiative group Ruangrupa (https://ruangrupa.org), “SUB/VERSION”, the OK_Video – Jakarta Video Festival 2005 is featuring, amongst others, a new media installation by Tintin Wulia, titled “Your Fingerprints Are Mine”.
Since 2000, Tintin Wulia has been exploring documentary and animation techniques to make her award-winning short films. “Your Fingerprints Are Mine” (2005) is her first step into new media installation, putting in consumer handycams, buttons that trigger sounds and toys inside a pitch-black peeping booth in her setup. Looking back at her training in architecture and film scoring, a step into such correlative spatial/audiovisual composition seems like an obvious next step for this time-based media artist.
In 2003, Tintin’s works were also selected for Ruangrupa’s first OK_Video – Jakarta Video Festival. Two of her previous short films were selected for the exhibition, and she made a short film titled “Everything’s OK” (Indonesia 2003, 5 minutes) as part of the workshop in the festival. This mix-media animation on urbanization has since been traveling to international festivals (including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands, January 2005) and exhibitions (including a group exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK, February 2005) and will be exhibited as part of Turkey’s 9th Istanbul Biennial in September 2005.
With “SUB/VERSION”, the second OK_Video – Jakarta Video Festival, Ruangrupa is “trying to raise the issues of technological power of video to incite an awareness in everyday life, and more importantly, to trigger critical apprehension of the moving images. Video art should not merely be a tool that can convey information, ideas or messages, but should give sharper insights to the way we see the reality, which is largely modified by technology and mass media.”
Ruangrupa’s second festival showcases selected 33 works of video and video installation from Indonesia, Mexico, UK, USA, China, Switzerland, Australia, Malaysia, Japan, Russia, Belgium, Korea, Austria, Taiwan, India, Italy, and Lebanon. Curators Agung Hujatnikajennong (Indonesia) and Che Kyongfa (Japan/Korea) present an international body of works using piracy, copying, sampling, re-mixing and hacking as a means or strategy to give a smart twist, critical comment and subverting the existing social norms, ideas and reality or history.
Tintin is bringing this theme further into a take on “surveillance” – the subtle stealing of people’s privacy. For Tintin, “Your Fingerprints Are Mine” is not merely a protest to piracy nor a showcase of piracy, but rather a small tickle to ask questions to the audience, to spark discussions about surveillance and the long history of piracy of people’s privacy.
“For the sake of preventing crime, surveillance often demands simplified identification. We suddenly find ourselves in a stereotype. Then, our simplistic identification gradually becomes our identity,” stated Tintin. This stereotyping, in her opinion, could lead to annihilation. “It is when people are not human anymore – they’re only part of a generalized group of people that could easily be identified and set aside whenever needed … a pattern that has happened over and over in history; this is usually a first step towards annihilation of a certain group of people.”
The installation is also made possible by the generous support of electrical engineer Erik Prabowo Kamal, Oktagon (https://oktagon.co.id) and several fellow artists and friends who lend in their consumer handycams.
At present, Bali-born Tintin Wulia is editing a few film works to be released in 2005 while looking to prepare her other base in Melbourne. After getting the jury’s award for her short film “Ketok” (Indonesia 2002, 5 minutes) in last year’s Festival Film Indonesia (FFI/Citra Award 2004), she was selected as one of the artists at Singapore’s Flying Circus Project 04 end of last year. Later this year she will be traveling to the Istanbul Biennial, Yokohama Triennial and Berlin’s House Of The World Culture to give talks presenting her works in the exhibitions.
Tintin is also looking forward to an artist residency month in Singapore where she will be wrapping up the first cycle of her traveling animation workshop with children. This workshop started in Hamburg (Germany) in 2003, continued in Bajawa, Flores (Indonesia) and Darwin (Australia) in 2004 and will see its first stage of completion in Tintin’s Singapore residency end of 2005. As part of her stay in Singapore, she will also begin her work in a Theatreworks project for 2006. In between, Tintin is shooting around the islands of Indonesia in a collaborative project.
Ruangrupa is an artists’ initiative founded in 2000 by a group of Jakarta based artists. Presently directed by artist Ade Darmawan, Ruangrupa is a non-profit organization that focuses on supporting the development of art in the cultural context through research, study and documentation, along with intensive cooperation with the artists through exhibitions, artist residency program, art project and workshop.
“SUB/VERSION”, the OK_Video – Jakarta Video Festival 2005 was opened on 17 July 2005 at the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia. Organized by Ruangrupa, the exhibition runs until 31 July 2005 and is supported by Stichting DOEN, RAIN – artist’ initiative network, HIVOS, Galeri Nasional Indonesia, The Japan Foundation, Netherlands Media Art Institute and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany.
Available upon request: 2 (two) digital sketch of “Your Fingerprints Are Mine”.
Available upon request after 28 July 2005: 2 (two) digital photos of “Your Fingerprints Are Mine” at National Gallery of Indonesia.
Press Contacts:
Tintin Wulia
+61 415 077 002 (until 28 July 2005) or +62 818 49 29 37
tintin@wulia.com
https://shortfilms.wulia.com
Ruangrupa
Jl. Tebet Barat Dalam IXA No. B1
Jakarta 12810, Indonesia
T/F: +62 21 8300211
Director: Ade Darmawan
info@ruangrupa.org
https://ruangrupa.org
