Musical Performance: Gamelan Chandra Natha

Musical Performance by Gamelan Chandra Natha, a Balinese Gamelan ensemble from the UGA Hugh Hodgson School of Music. 

This event is part of the exhibition and event series New Gods | Old Gods featuring visiting Balinese artist I Made "Bayak" Muliana (Made Bayak), which takes place at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA) and other Athens and UGA venues from March 25 through April 7, 2019. Bayak will take part in a community-wide series of events, performances, and talks, which offer the community many opportunities to interact with the artist and learn about his work and the cultural context in which it takes place. All events are free and open to the public.

Bayak’s visual practice merges images and symbols from Balinese cosmology and current Balinese political and ecological movements to bring attention to parasitic real estate development and past actions of violence within Bali. The colorful and piercing narrative works that will be on exhibition use waste plastic and trash, ink, acrylic paint, stencils, and traditional Balinese painting techniques to tell difficult stories of Balinese history. Additional documentary photographs and videos of his work and contextual information about Bali will also be on exhibit.

The ATHICA exhibit and surrounding events are curated and organized by Peter Brosius, Distinguished Research Professor in the department of anthropology, and Alden DiCamillo, an interdisciplinary artist, graduate student in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and ATHICA intern. Together with Sarah Hitchner, assistant research scientist at UGA, they are conducting research on how Bayak’s work weaves narratives of explicit and implicit violence into a visual activism that uses innovative material experimentation combined with energetic portrayals of Balinese cosmology. Anthropologists Brosius and Hitchner have conducted long-term research in Indonesia and Malaysia regarding threats to cultural landscapes and displacement of indigenous communities through land degradation and violent real estate policy.

The exhibit and surrounding events are sponsored by ATHICA with the support of The James E. and Betty J. Huffer Foundation and Creature Comforts Brewery, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the department of anthropology, the Center for Integrative Conservation Research, Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), the Office of Sustainability, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, the Lyndon House Arts Center, and the Athens-Clarke County Solid Waste Department.