BAIK + KHNEYSSER presents

Gegerboyo is a Yogyakarta-based artist collective whose works reflect critically on social and political phenomena by taking subjects from everyday life. Their work is inspired by Javanese culture and traditions, as well as contemporary urban space. Founded in June 2017, Gegerboyo is Vendy Methodos, Enka Komariah, Dian Suci Rahmawati, Ipeh Nur, and Prihatmoko Moki, each of whom is an artist with excellent drawing skills, prone to visual experimentation. This ethos can be seen not only in terms of narrative construction and figurative forms in their work, but also in their efforts to articulate the attitudes and behavior of ordinary social kinship.

Gegerboyo's distinctive style is anchored in traditional cultural expressions. Their visual language consists of representational elements that are composed into polemical structures to reference identity politics and power relations. Gegerboyo’s images locate supernatural figures within 'spectral' backgrounds or landscapes in incongruous ways, drawing on the linguistic phenomenon of semiotics which separates visual and verbal signs from presumed meanings.

Gegerboyo's contribution to the virtual exhibition Art Jakarta 2020 is a visual summary of their latest project, Goro-Goro Gegerboyo. Gegerboyo introduced these contemporary, urban wayang characters through the Paguyuban Gegerboyo, a realm hosted on the artists’ Instagram profile @gegerboyo. Goro-Goro Gegerboyo started as a response to the global pandemic from the perspective of grassroots society. Using social media to reach a wide public, the artists reached beyond the isolation of the shuttered gallery to create a contemporary interpretation of the Indonesian wayang shadow puppet tradition for today's media society. Goro-Goro Gegerboyo adopts the shadow puppet into drawings in a GIF online format. The effect is both humorous and socially critical. Framed by class consciousness and modernization, Goro-Goro Gegerboyo represents a society preparing to face global crises.