Jumaadi: My Love is in an Island Far Away

Bundanon’s Exhibition Season, Tales of Land and Sea, brought together three distinct projects exploring storytelling, mythological narratives, migration and the diasporic experience.

Together, the exhibitions explored cross-generational experiences of migration and the movement of people and goods across the sea. Drawing from both personal narratives and Eastern mythologies, works highlighted age-old themes of longing, displacement, cultural connection and belonging.

Tales of the Land and Sea featured work by Visual Artist, Jumaadi, who was born in East Java, Indonesia and who currently lives and works between Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Mosman, Australia

My Love is in an Island Far Away, takes inspiration from the celebrated poem of the same name Cintaku Jauh di Pulau, by one of Indonesia’s most important writers, Chairil Anwar. Jumaadis imagery traverses the histories and narratives that weave between our neighbouring countries of Indonesia and Australia. In several new series of artworks including paintings, hand tooled buffalo hide works and major large scale installation works, Jumaadi responds to and interprets the historical events of the internment of Javanese political detainees, who lived in exile in the Dutch penal colony of Tanah Merah, Digul, Western Papua from 1926 and were eventually stationed in Cowra, Central Western New South Wales at the request of the Dutch colonists during the Second World War (1943 – 1944). The artist juxtaposes these little known and dark events in our nations’ shared histories with Chairil Anwar’s epic and folkloric narrative tale of voyage, longing and love. In staging the exhibition My Love is in an Island Far Away, Jumaadi invites audiences to revisit the past through a new lens of creative imagery that re-imagines these difficult stories through a range of visually arresting and poetic artworks that speak to human resilience, the power of beauty and the enduring nature of love: of people, of culture and country.