a brief profile

taken from Bandung New Emergence v.3 catalogue,
written by Chabib D.H. and Agung Hujatnikajennong


Since two up to three years ago, Endira Fitriasti Julianda has beens known through her participation in several exhibitions in Bandung and Jakarta. Her paintings and drawings have shown distinctive style and technique. Endira works on various photographic images that were turned into black-and-white and grayscale nuances to bring the enigmatic and poetic impression. If the colors on photographic imageries often become visual elements that describe certain information, Endira’s works precisely have intention to hide it instead.

Many of Endira’s works raise issues about the modern-urban human life, through portrayal of daily life images. One of themes that she has worked on recently deals with the issue of human relationships with his / her pets. In the history of human civilization, animals have experienced domestication by human, exiled from their native habitat and environment. The existence of zoos and pets in the human domestic environment indicates such situation. With the help of technology and sciences, human even do breeding in order to engineer animal’s appearance in order to make them ‘perfect’ by ‘human standard’. Examined more deeply, Endira’s works concept implies power relation in the anthropocentric civilizations. Not only towards animals, humans also created ‘domestication’ towards other human beings during the period of colonialism and slavery.

In her various discussions with R.E. Hartanto, Endira admitted that she got many important input. For the BNE v.3 this time, she decides to explore new media by trying to work with photography and video. Although photos and video are not entirely new technics for Endira, she chose the medium because they deem an urgent need to realize the idea. In her video and photo works Endira tries to play a role as a dog that wants to meet with other dog. At the same time, the work invites viewers to feel the experience of being a dog for some time. Endira feels that to be able to ‘interpret’ and ‘reworked’ on certain vision/sight of a dog, photos and video are the most appropriate medium. The images in the works somehow appear blurred, because, according to Endira, a dog’s sense of sight is not special like its sense of smell. Endira also wants to say some things are considered taboo by human, are common for dogs. (AHJ / CDH)