MELLA JAARSMA ::::

“I elaborate costume installations and adopt the notion of garments as an outward or symbolic expression. They are loaded metaphors of race, sexuality, authenticity, and origins. They deconstruct identities and unearth deeper underlying issues of cultural representation—questioning humanity, individualism, displacement, migration, and the sacred and the profane.

Austere and usually shroudlike, the costumes cover the body and face with openings to reveal the eyes or expose other body parts, addressing identity issues such as ethnicity, class, and gender politics.

The Warrior costumes are hanging in a wok or pan and become ingredients of fortifying broth or soup, often later offered to an audience, connecting hunting, killing, feeding, and healing. Refugee Only and Shelter Me IV refer to the current global reality of migration in which everybody has to be ready to become a refugee.” —Mella Jaarsma

Born in the Netherlands, Mella Jaarsma lives and works in Yogyakarta. Her work often takes the form of articles of clothing that cover the face and much of the body, leaving the eyes uncovered. Resembling burkas, as constrictive as shrouds, as protective as cocoons, these cloak-tents adapt to the form of the body like a second skin, but at the same time envelop it, concealing it. Jaarsma makes them out of varied materials obtainable locally: organic elements like hides, horns, or other animal parts; seaweed, scraps of cloth; or, as with Refugee Only, pieces of military uniforms. Jaarsma tackles the theme of dwelling and the city, accumulations of stories and lives in movement, as well as that of the home, understood as the prime reference of individual and social identification—not the home we go back to, but the one that, on any journey we make, whether real or metaphorical, we carry inside us.