" 9/11", oil and mixed media on canvas, 2003, VxHcm: 104 x 80 cm
Astari Rasjid
Astari Rasjid was born in 1953 in Jakarta. She has studied painting at the University of Minnesota, USA and at the Royal College of Art, London. She now lives and works in Jakarta, although she often takes parts in the various exhibitions in the United States.
In the last ten years, Astari’s works has focused on a series of self-portraits but with changing signifying fields often showing a search for self-history not bound solely by the exploration of personal experiences and memories. Opinions, parodies and stereotypes often displayed in her works signify that the representations of Astari’s self-histories show the de-coding symptoms and the re-positionings of the self that continually take place.
Astari once painted a self-portrait together with the portrait of Frida Kahlo. In this painting, the two woman exchanged costumes. Astari painted herself in a traditional Mexican clothing and Frida Kahlo in traditional Javanese one. Astari titled the painting T-Time, read as “Tea Time”. The title was supposed to refer to the feudalistic tradition of the English, that has become widely adopted elsewhere. Taken together, “T” and “Time” in this title, however, refer to “the time” in the discourse of time and space. About this painting, Astari said: “Seen through the perspective of gender, traditions in a traditional and modern living are just the same. Such traditions transcend time and place and give women a sub-ordinate position.”
The painting 9/11 exhibited in Abu Dhabi Art Fair belongs to the same series of self-portraits, here executed in the manner of Italian Renaissance portraiture but infused with traditional Balinese motifs and the unsettling connotations of 9/11 happenings in the background.
