Organizer: Harvard University Asia Center
Description:
Entang Wiharso, b. 1967 in Tegal, Central Java, Indonesia, graduate of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (Yogyakarta), maintains studios in both Java and the U.S. His life and family are bicultural, biracial, and inheritors of diverse religious and spiritual legacies. When the Sky is Falling is part of his work stemming from a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship.
Wiharso’s multi-disciplinary practice speaks with urgency through many media: painting, sculpture, video, installations, and performance. His dramatic visual language is instantly recognizable with its unique depictions of contemporary life, and its relation to the mythologies of a centuries-old Javanese and animist past and the high-speed, hyper-connected lifestyle of the 21st century, layered with social, political and sexual critique, revealing a complex picture of the human condition.
Wiharso has had more than 45 solo gallery and museum exhibitions. His work is held in over thirty international museums and private collections. He was in Prospect.3 (2014) and has represented Indonesia in the Kunming Art Biennale (2019); 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Prague Bi-ennale 6 (2013); 6th Nanjing Biennale (2010); Second Asian Art Biennale (2009); 51st Venice Biennale (2005); and the Second Beijing Biennale (2005).
The Harvard Asia Center’s exhibition, When the Sky is Falling, includes three recent pieces and two older ones. Don’t Touch Me is an earlier work (2004), lent to this exhibit by Professors Mary-Jo and Byron Good. "Don’t Touch Me embodies spiritual and visceral responses to Indonesian and American disorders and to global insecurities and paranoia, and a revulsion to fear of terror,” the Goods have written, based on Entang’s reflections. “Don’t Touch Me is a protest against being tainted with fear and terror and expresses a desire to escape being emotionally overwhelmed by the war on terror; it seeks ‘the sublime’.” Entang later reflected, with Professor Michael Fischer, that the blazing terrified “cannon ball” figures of Homer Simpson and his terror derives from the post 9/11 growing paranoia about foreigners in the U.S. and his own fear of going out in a time of attacks on people believed to be Muslim, at the same time that Muslims were publicly demonstrating patriotism and loyalty to the U.S. It is one of many images of the pervasive narrative of the American dream and what it represents around the world.
Wiharso describes his work as reflecting, through images, on our past and our present, as he invites his viewers to join him in attempting to understand this historical moment and our common destiny.
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