Jongen

Benjamin Soedira is a Glasgow-based artist who works predominantly with the photographic medium as a means of understanding and exploring. Soedira’s work encapsulates the ideas of belonging and foreignness, both coinciding with one another in order to create the idea of home and familiarity. The visual work created follows the documentary elements within the photographic medium, whilst pushing the photograph in a way that can be read conceptually and descriptively.

Soedira’s new work and current work-in-progress Jongen aims to explore a family history entangled in repression and landscape. Through which, Soedira will travel through Indonesia to West Papua (his father’s birthplace) to reunite with family, along with understanding an identity so little is known about. Soedira hopes to break down preconceptions of Indonesian identities by slowly moving forward with his father’s motherland, West Papua. A dark colonial past alongside the dizzying everyday life of a place Soedira is still navigating. Jongen aims to find answers in a place where family and identity have been out of reach.

From plantation sites to everyday stillness, Soedira examines the intricate moments which have slowly been leading up to what he believes is an answer to one's identity. The past, present and future have all been encapsulated through the photographic medium, from a sense of playfulness to a darker curiosity into the history that has shaped a family and identity that comes with it. Soedira begins to unravel his preconceptions of where his identity comes from, to a new future of understanding.
Opening