S2 Ep.4: TO MARK. TO GROUND. THE SHADOWS OF PLACE: BOEDI WIDJAJA | Artist

May 1

BOEDI WIDJAJA is a prolific, international artist whose work is deeply tied to his personal experience of being a migrant child in Southeast Asia. Impacted by the region’s complicated entangled histories, his poetic art explores themes of diaspora, memory, cultural hybridity, identity and space.

He writes: “I draw significantly from my itinerant childhood - leaving Indonesia due to ethnic tensions, separation from parents, moving between stranger-families in Singapore. The experience seeded my interest in national and geopolitical histories—past and contemporary—and how, in so many ways, they collide violently with our personal lives. Living amidst Southeast Asia’s entangled histories and the diversity of cultures and languages in the region, I am particularly interested in exploring the visual and semiotic intersection between words and images, where symbols and signs sometimes blur, to birth new hybrid meanings.”

Boedi Widjaja Bio

Boedi Widjaja originally trained as an architect, (with a Bachelor of Architecture (Hons) from the University of New South Wales, Sydney), and then practiced as a graphic designer prior to becoming an artist. His works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including live works throughout Singapore, where he lives, and abroad in England, France, Italy, Australia, Indonesia and the United States, in NY. He is the recipient of many awards, residencies and commissions.

Widjaja received the inaugural QAGOMA and Singapore Art Museum co-commission for his Black–Hut series, presented at the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (2018-19) and the 6th Singapore Biennale (2019-20). His works have been included in international group shows such as Cladogram: KMA’s 2nd International Juried Biennial (2021), Katonah Museum of Art, New York, in which he was awarded First Prize; MAP1: Waterways (2017), Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale; Jerusalem Biennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016); From east to the Barbican (2015), Barbican, London; Infinity in flux (2015), ArtJog, Indonesia; and Bains Numériques #7 (2012), Enghien-les-Bains, France amongst others. Recent solo exhibitions include Kang Ouw (2022), Esplanade Tunnel, Singapore; Declaration of (2019), Helwaser Gallery, New York; Rivers and lakes Tanah dan air (2018), ShanghART Singapore; and Black—Hut (2016), Singapore Biennale Affiliate Project, ICA Singapore. He was an Artist-in-Residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Temenggong Singapore and DRAWinternational France.

Website: BOEDIWIDJAJA.COM
Social Media: @boediwijaja
Facebook: Boedi Widjaja

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT

“…I thought a lot about the place I came from while not having a real and bodily connection with it, yet this imagined homeland was so strongly present in my mind, In contrast to the actual physical surrounding that I was in, which was Singapore, and the feeling of not being able to ground myself in the city. These entanglements of identity of place led to, I suppose, the impulse to try to connect what I had always felt to be disconnected. And, that takes the form of these hybridized concepts, media, languages, histories mythologies and so forth. And I guess it is not a random thing to think about hybridization in a place like Singapore, where we are so well known for our multicultural environmenT… It is really a place that offers that opportunity to see things from multiple perspectives and to consider elements that seem to be contradictory at first, and to think of ways or finding some common ground or to generate new things out of that contradiction. And, that is where my interest lies in with this idea of hybridity. It is always a method to look for something new, something unknown, at least to me and something personal, something idiosyncratic, to the experiences that I had lived through.”