Mella Jaarsma | Roy Villevoye 

Kunsthal KAdE will show a double-solo from May 2025: Mella Jaarsma: Trouble Skirts and Roy Villevoye: Imaginable Lives. Both artists have been creating art for over 30 years and are connected to the Indonesian archipelago in different ways. Jaarsma has been living and working there for 40 years, exploring cultural diversity and identity through themes such as the body and its covering, and the role of food (consumption and production). Villevoye has traveled frequently to the Asmat in Papua since the early 1990s, where he has built a very personal relationship with the community and reflects on those encounters and experiences in his work. Both artists create dialogues between different cultures and challenge the viewer to take a critical look at how ‘the other’ is defined and perceived. The following publications accompanied this exhibition Roy Villevoye - Imaginable Lives and Mella Jaarsma - Trouble Skirts.

Mella Jaarsma: Trouble Skirts

Mella Jaarsma moved from the Netherlands to Jakarta in the mid-1980s to study and then settled in Yogyakarta, where she has lived and worked ever since.  

Her work reflects her everyday environment, both in her subjects, techniques and materials. She often works with natural materials, such as tree bark, animal skins, palm fibers, coconut husks, but also with industrial objects, found objects and textiles. Drawing from her own dual cultural background, Jaarsma's costumes, installations and performances explore the different layers of society and how we see ourselves in relation to the world and each other. By working with different communities, especially in Indonesia but also beyond, she interweaves various (historical) perspectives and offers a critical view of culture, identity and power. 

With her costumes, installations and performances, Jaarsma questions the relationship between man and nature and the dominions in which man is central and history is often written by "those in power. Her costumes function as a second skin, which can not only be worn, but also conveys something. In her work, the body is never isolated, but connected to layers of individuality, culture and ideology. Jaarsma invites viewers to explore their own cultural background, taboos and interpretations. Curator Alia Swastika writes in her article "Experiencing The Body And History, Heeding Feelings And Senses"(2023): 'Many of Mella's artworks explore the role of clothing, body covering or protection in social and cultural contexts. In doing so, she makes connections to historical events that occurred when the work was made, and shows how, as an artist, she plays with fantasy and her imagination in interpreting various identities. Her work often contains rich metaphors, using materials not only as text and context, but also as aesthetic choices, media and symbols that contribute to our collective memory.  

In 1988, Jaarsma, together with Nindityo Adipurnomo, founded the Cemeti Institute for Art & Society, one of the first contemporary art spaces in Indonesia, which has grown into an important platform for artists, curators and writers both locally and internationally. 

Roy Villevoye: Imaginable Lives

Roy Villevoye began making abstract paintings in the 1990s in which primary colors were combined with "skin colors," initially using only paint and make-up, later also using photography. After the first visits to the Asmat region in Papua, Villevoye began to use photography and video works to reflect on the specific conditions of the area, its social structures and the cultural traditions of the community, some of which were elusive to him. This eventually resulted in (realistic) images of both Papuans and all sorts of other figures of people. Villevoye sees these images as re-enactments, capturing a lived experience with the person in question.  

Villevoye is the outsider. He participates in the community, consciously seeks out the unknown and uncertain, puts himself at risk - physically and mentally - and translates that into images, both on the flat surface and three-dimensionally and in video. They are echoes of reality - readymades, even if it is photography - with no other purpose than to penetrate to the essence of interpersonal contact. Or as Ine Gevers writes in her text for the catalog: '(...) to refer to the underlying life force in the lives of his Asmat friends and how it intertwined with his own. This despite great cultural differences and transcending all circumstances. The bond between these people, and the hospitality they offered Roy to participate in their community, to be a part of it and thus to feel what being human could mean, was greater than any recognizable diversity.' 

Villevoye is aware of the problematic history of exhibiting people as objects in the 19^e and 20^e century. Therefore, his sculptures are not representations of certain stereotypes, but portraits of equal individuals - by name, of people who were not "seen" for a long time - with whom the artist enters into personal relationships in order to arrive at his work from the dynamics of that relationship. For this, the artist consciously seeks the blending of his personal (living) world with that of the Asmat.  

The exhibition is part of a series of "double solos" that Kunsthal KAdE has curated since 2011. In 2011, the Francis Upritchard & Ansel Krut, in 2016 David Altmejd & Friedrich Kunath and in 2021 Natasja Kensmil & Sadik Kwaish Alfraji.