SPOTTED: Metropolis M explores how BEAR Fine Art graduate Rizq Naherta connects queer communities through Project ITC
- Fine Art
Every year, the magazine Metropolis M releases a Graduation Special, featuring work from various alumni who graduated as visual artists. Rizq Naherta graduated from BEAR Fine Art in Arnhem and is one of the alumni featured in the special. Metropolis M asked Rizq the question: "What is the story behind your work?"
Rizq Naherta’s Project ITC takes the form of an illegal bootleg video shop. The walls are hung with remakes of GAYa Nusantara magazines provided by Queer Indonesia Archive, covers of primarily non-Western queer films and a large airbrush portrait of Bunda Dorce, Indonesia's first trans-superstar. Naherta sits at a table in the middle of the shop and talks to the visitors. In exchange for a queer story (your own or someone else's), you receive a film of your choice. Naherta collects the stories in a growing archive. There are stories about first loves, first kisses and gender, but also about community care and mutual care between homosexuals. “Care is so important, people need to always look after each other, in all kinds of ways and as often as possible."
Naherta calls themselves a baby queer and is looking for connections that confirm both their queerness and their Indonesian identity. Fortunately, they found this community feeling in various Dutch cities. For instance, together with queer community builders and activists from south-east Asia, she recently took part in a panel discussion in the recently opened Arnhem queer café De Kurk.
"My work is a direct, immersive reference to bootleg shops, of which there are many in Jakarta. I call myself a shopowner", says Naherta laughing. They explained that the trans and queer communities in their homeland primarily exist underground, but are nevertheless closely connected with those in other Asian countries. It struck them that there are also many communities in the Netherlands which are connected to those in Indonesia.
With Project ITC, they are connecting themselves and their practice with these newly found communities. Naherta hopes to show others how important it is to constantly expand and share your knowledge of queer history, as a way of detaching the idea of queerness from whiteness. The accessible invitation to sit down with the artist offers an opportunity of doing so.
Author: Inge Pollet, curator and poet