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Art & Dialog Indonesia: The Collaborations of Brahma Tirta Sari
October 16, 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
Ismoyo and Nia of Brahma Tirta Sari share life-changing experiences of travel and collaboration in Australia, the United States of America, and Africa
The reality of being on a planet with more than 7 billion people requires collaborative capacities in every arena, many of which have never been truly developed. The capacities of different cultures to mutually enrich each other creates amazing possibilities that could never be created by each culture in isolation. Starting in 1989, Agus Ismoyo and Nia Fliam began their interaction with indigenous cultures in Australia, the US and Africa where they eventually carried out intensive collaborations and cultural exchanges.
Crossing the visible and invisible boundaries of national-ethnic backgrounds, traditional-contemporary arts and crafts, Agus Ismoyo (Indonesian) and Nia Fliam (American) have been working together since 1985 to create contemporary textiles at their fine art batik studio, Brahma Tirta Sari in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Ismoyo’s ancestors were batik makers in the city of Solo on Java. During his youth, Ismoyo studied industrial management at the University of Technology Yogyakarta. Meanwhile, Nia initially explored dye resist techniques from Africa and Asia in America. She completed a fine arts degree at Pratt Institute in New York City before coming to Indonesia in 1983 to study traditional batik.
In this presentation, Ismoyo and Nia will share their life-changing experiences of travel and collaboration in Australia, USA, and Africa. At the outset, Ismoyo and Nia used Indonesian cultural traditions to find inspiration in their collaborative batik work and then expanded that exploration by exploring the creative process of other peoples’ ancient cultural heritage. This experience, which both of them found very enriching, helped them shape their contemporary creative work. Especially important was learning how the role of art in the past was closely related to respect for nature. How they have been able to take these ancient lessons and shape them into contemporary artworks, in this technological age, is the journey they share at the Portland event.
