Lobbying The New Body of Work of Aris A Yaacob

Left to right: Rozita Md (Novas Curator), Aris A Yaacob (the artist)
& Erwina AGhafar (Head Curator of Novas)
go to www.novas.org/contemporary-urban-centres/

Aris A Yaacob (visual interpretation of wayang kulit) copyright 2007

An event at Liverpool Novas Contemporary Urban Centres in 2009, the capital culture of Europe. A new body of work by Aris A Yaacob, High Priest: The Songs of Destruction.

This exhibition is a quest. Questioning the significant of the High Priest in relation to society – how one group of people has been divided by the power of a man who some consider consecrated and some bigoted. He is not just an ordinary man, but a leader of men.

In wayang, a form of shadow puppet performance, the operator of the puppets is regarded as the High Priest who capable of surpassing human belief that the wayang is God. Thus, every word of the High Priest is a word of God, the truth and absolute. Somehow along the line, the audience is shadowed by the sacred power that the High Priest has secured. He is the God illegitimate child, invention of evilness, and deliberately disseminates poison through the religious songs for power and control.

According to Seneca the Younger, Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. An excellent analogy that we can look at as the High Priest uses religion to protect his own interest or magisterium or perhaps, purely for political and economic reasons. Hence, Napoleon once said, Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

For this six week exhibition in 2009, a collection of iconographic works will be exhibited, which include drawings, paintings and a reinterpretation version of wayang performance.

‘... to find strategy of meaningful social, political, and cultural positioning , arguably the most critical challenge confronting, contemporary art today,certainly, making sense the relationship of my practice – breaking the boundary of visual and performance art, freeing the space and separation’ Aris A Yaacob (the artist).

'It is time for wayang to be reread ' Erwina AGhafar (Head Curator of Novas)...