Sara Nuytemans
(b. 1970, Belgium) Lives and works in Den Haag, The Netherlands and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her work is a combination of audio visual strategies and mixed reality installation and performances. She explores the boundary between the real and the artificial. Not only does she try to stimulate the viewer's curiosity, making her/him want to discover whether what she/he sees is ‘real’ or not, but she also shows that the line between ‘reality’ and ‘suggestion’ is thin and foggy indeed. She graduated with a Masters in Digital Arts, from the Audiovisual Institute of the Pompeu Fabra University, Spain and also has a Masters of Science in Industrial Design and Engineering from Delft University of Technology, Holland. She has participated in exhibitions throughout Europe, Canada, Russia, Turkey and Indonesia, and participated in the Landing Soon Residency programme at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, 2006 and since then collaborates regularly with Arya Pandjalu

Arya Pandjalu
(b. 1976, Indonesia) studied print making at the Indonesia Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta, graduating in 2005. His work focuses on social and personal story telling through installation, print making, painting, sculpture and performance. In his works he plays with medium to transfer and transform his ideas. He has participated in the Landing Soon Residency programme at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, in 2006 and had a residency at Andergrond in The Netherlands. Solo exhibitions include Phone Number My Hand, O House Gallery, Jakarta, 2009, Lost, Andergrond, Den Haag, The Netherlands, 2008; ChiChitChuit, Parkir Space, Yogyakarta. He collaborates regularly with Sara Nuytemans.

Curator’s note:

Birdprayers is an ongoing multi-site, multi-disciplinary project that combines performance, exhibitions and talks by artists Sara Nuytemans (The Netherlands) and Arya Pandjalu (Indonesia). It is a creative response to the weighty and seemingly impossible to resolve issue of religious conflict in the world. By representing four major world religions, Judaism, Catholicism, Hinduism and Islam the artists react and challenge competing (and at times inter) religious hegemonies locked in a never-ending debate of often bloody and polemical drama. However, although Birdprayers expresses the need for unity and peace, rather than being strictly utopian in focus, the project also highlights the difficult realities of such a goal through playful and sombre strategies. CUT2010 has selected photographic documentation of the ongoing performance strand of the project, titled All in the Mind as part of the exhibition.

Four protagonists, in neutral costumes, wear models of each of the main houses of worship on top of their heads: a church, synagogue, mosque and Hindu temple. They walk through their surroundings and or position themselves as living monuments for viewers to be confused, amused and challenged. The images in CUT2010 represent five of the performances that have taken place so far in Bali, Yogyakarta, Istanbul, Rome and The Hague, but the photographs are now dislocated from their original context as a framing device for performance documentation.  As such, the aesthetics of the images becomes a rhetorical device that is just as interesting as the thing it describes. It also contributes to the legacy of the project as both artwork and document.

The scenes are lush and compelling yet fractured with mystery and unanswered questions. The project as a whole confronts the physical and mental walls built by conservative notions surrounding the external ritualisation of mass religion and culture. The artists comment that these dividers affirm that each religion is its own world and when placed side by side, they literally represent parallel universes. Such a psychological underpinning prompts deep questions about faith and its function in contemporary society.