Artist : Heri Dono
Year : 2004
Mixed Media.
Dimension : 35 x 65 x 90 cm.
The work “Born and Freedom” (2004) is an installation consisiting of an array of five humanbird couples on the wall, joined together by a chain to animals in front of them. On the chest of the human-bird is a machine and colour of the body that gives off a dull archaic expression. The animals, with the same expression, have wheels affixed to their hind legs. These hybrid figures were born as mythological beings, combining the past world with the present technology, at the same time challenging the liberties of the present world.
Heri Dono is renowned as a contemporary Indonesian artist who combines a lot of traditional idioms and archaic items with forms and problems of today’s world. In this rather strange and abstruse combination of the objects, satyrical and paradoxical meanings often appear.
This expression is a response and his intensely critical stance about the ills of the world. With brutal deformation, objects often express criticism and parody of the current, often political and cultural issues.