DERAU: A Solo Exhibition of Hedi Soetardja

Hedi Soetardja (1976) is an artist from Jelengkong, a “painters’ village” in the south of Bandung.

For this solo exhibition, Hedi tries to become a phenomenological body that experiences sense-transmitted encounters and daily phenomena without intervening rationalizations that oftentimes only serve to abridge the way we perceive things. Hedi likens his brushstrokes, as found in his current paintings, as a collection of noise (derau). Noise is identified as messages whose distribution processes have been disrupted, thus making these messages difficult to understand. In Hedi’s understanding, noise is (also) the result of his perception of the world that exists beyond accepted languages.