Everything You Want is On the Other Side of Fear: examining Vanessa Van Houten’s FREEFALL

How hard the journey of reconciliation must be when it is almost impossible to do ourselves. This process, of finding what is at the core of oneself, ones culture, ones femininity (or lack thereof) has been flooding into the doors of our galleries as of late. It is everywhere (and so it should be), but particularly for a country like Indonesia, it has come at a pivotal point in time. Still young in their contemporary art scene, to look upon it in Jakarta is like looking upon a toddler. Fumbling through a walk, trying to find a voice, but importantly full of promise. At the moment, one of the prevailing discourses in Indonesian culture is where and how the collective place themselves (or choose to place themselves) against the backdrop of the world.

There is always something interesting about the how displaced see and approach the rest of their society. For Vanessa van Houten, there was the advantage of seeing with a different set of eyes, of ones which would always be outside, but which were somehow also within. Her solo exhibition Freefall depicts honesty in a heart-shatteringly vulnerable way, and shows that there is a certain type of patience that revolves around not understanding, although always trying to.

Originally from Germany, van Houten lived in Australia before moving to Indonesia in 2013 and so it is no surprise, that for her, the personal envelops practice. Displayed within a hand-made circular space inside the gallery, the exhibition is transformed into a cyclical journey, mimicking the discourse it embodies. Van Houten works with time, the sun and moments, humbly waiting for something to emerge. Setting a timer for an hour in her studio, freedom is dispensed onto the subjects[1], creating a collection of unique portraits that are earnestly genuine and unapologetically vulnerable.

There is something universal about the personal, we are guilty often forgetting this, no matter how hard we know it. This exhibition was more than discovering the idea of Indonesian-ness, if that can even be a constant made possible to define. It was the universality of beauty and honesty. Of struggle, of the battle to discover the unknown that resides in the depths of the soul. Freefall set out to explore what it means to be Indonesian, but it superseded intention. It lay bare some the answers to the questions asking as an Indonesian, what it is to be human.

[1] van Houten, Vanessa. “Artist Talk.” Interview by Beatrice F. Gabriel. Monash University, March 11, 2018.