At the dinner table, we meet.
At the dinner table, we exchange ideas and get to know each other.
Every society must have traditions and ways of processing, serving, and eating food. In the context of my family, which has a Chinese descent background in Indonesia, eating together has an essential role in everyday life. We have the habit of eating together at certain hours. We will gather at the dining table and eat food while chatting about our daily activities. Indirectly chatting while eating is our common thread to listen to each other and get closer to the members of another family. Likewise, with passing food recipes from parents to children, these processes and traditions may be continued or passed down. The family gets bigger, a child builds his own small family, and both parents live at the dinner table, keep the memory, and hope that the children and grandchildren will gather again in the coming holidays.
Biography
Yudha Kusuma Putera is a multi-disciplinary photographic artist from Yogyakarta. He frequently does collaborative works, starting by offering an idea to participants or collaborators to be discussed and open to negotiation to create photography-based works. This negotiation process has changed and formed the final of his works from the initial idea.
For the past few years, Yudha consistently used this participatory and performative method and approach that emphasizes the participant’s embodied experience. He is interested in exploring the intimacy and closeness of human relations such as living space, neighbors, children, and family. For him, negotiating and building conversations is an essential process besides the work of photography itself. Yudha is a member of the collective Ruang Mes 56 and a finalist in the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize 2021.