Dari, Inquiry of From
Sebastianus’s solo exhibition, titled Dari, is a deeply personal anthology exploring these myriad points of origin, or ‘from’s. His work on ‘dari/froms’ is part of a continuous ethnography, cartography, and inquiry into modes of existence. In his search for points of origin, Sebastianus references philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, a non-hierarchical sprawl of various roots, shoots, and possible trajectories, always open to interconnection and entanglement with others. Rooted in his lived experiences of being raised in a multi-religious household, and coming of age in a society and culture in transition, Sebastianus locates his ‘being’ on this constantly shifting plane, freeing himself from constricting binaries or definitions shaped by institutions such as family, religion, and society; or terms such as artist /craftsman /ethnographer /shaman. Aligning himself with the experimental praxis of artists who embrace flux, such as Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramović, Sebastianus inhabits multiple roles and positions all at once, in order to forge new directions and possibilities of being. Drawing freely from the various cultures and knowledge-systems he has lived between and experienced, from his academic education in the West to the mastery of making as ritual gleaned from the weavers in his grandmother’s hometown in East Java, Sebastianus interweaves myriad threads of ‘knowing’ or 'understanding’, to propose his own tapestry of being, becoming and belonging. In approaching Sebastianus’s work, it is important to understand the distinction the artist makes between different terms employed to refer to ‘art’ in Indonesia. The first, and most commonly encountered, is seni, a direct translation of ‘art’ or the German ‘kunst’