POLA : MOTIF

For the 2016 OzAsia Festival program in Adelaide (South Australia), curator Emily Rustanto presented an exhibition at the Adelaide Festival Centre exploring connections between patterns in Indonesian textiles and music. 

 

The exhibition was called Pola: motif. 

 

The textiles featured in the exhibition were specially loaned by Kadar and Anton Lucas from their local collection in Adelaide.

 

The exhibition was produced by Performing Arts Collection staff at the Adelaide Festival Centre.  

 

Some sponsorship support was provided by Flinders University’s Jembatan initiative, which works to build bridges between Australia and Indonesia. The curator used the Jembatan funding to travel to Yogyakarta in Central Java, Indonesia to record Indonesian musicians playing music patterns.

 

The exhibition Pola: motif was on display throughout the 2016 OzAsia Festival in the glass cases of the Adelaide Festival Centre foyer. 

 

The textiles, with their visual motifs, adapted beautifully to this temporary home. The music patterns struggled to make themselves heard from under the glass.

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It was also not possible to have a sound output for each textile due to restrictions on the audio infrastructure. All music and video files had to be relayed from two display cases only, regardless of where their associated textiles hung.

 

To navigate visitors around the exhibition, the curator gave each textile a ‘song title’, to be matched with its music audio of the same name. For consistency, the textiles without a song were given a song title too.

 

To do the music part of the exhibition project justice, it was decided to make it into an interactive website. The website is finally here. And you have found it!

 

From the menu bar or icon, you can access further information about the exhibition and its contributors. And you can navigate the online version of Pola: motif – the exhibition.

 

The exhibition component of this website, where the individual textiles and music files can be accessed, is organised into 5 pattern themes:

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• ZOOMORPHIC

• INTERLOCKING-INTERWOVEN

• FORMULAIC-GEOMETRIC-RHYTHMIC

• MYSTIC-ESOTERIC

• AESTHETIC

 

Click on one of these pattern headings from the menu bar, and then select from the list of ‘song titles’ and their associated textile images and soundtracks.

 

Listen to the musical motifs while you gaze upon the textile patterns.

 

Look at the textiles for as long as you wish.

 

Turn up the music volume as loud as you wish.

 

Now go and explore!