Immortal Words

Immortal Words, Boedi Widjaja's new body of works from which the exhibition takes its title, adopts science as a method to discover the untraceable past of a person - and of a community - a past that is not based on tangible facts or recorded history, but on memories and experiences, and on our own origins. To do so, Widjaja returns to language and DNA - both recognised as bearer of memories, either experiential or cultural.

This approach to memory is not new to the artist. In previous works, also presented in this exhibition, such as A tree talks, a tree walks 梧桐语・菩提径 (2019) and A tree rings, a tree sings 树龄 · 树铃 (2021), Widjaja respectively encodes hybrid DNA as a music score. In the works Path. 12, River Origin 浪淘沙 (2021) and Path. 13, Quaver Cipher (2023) he explores the power of muons to subliminally establish our past in a cosmic dimension.

Specifically for Immortal Words, 12 ultra-conserved words (words that are believed to have remainde unchanged for 15,000 years) are phonetically notated in hanacaraka, the oldest Indonesian script he learnt as a child, into other Southeast Asia languages. Their sounding approximation is then matched to codons to create new, hybrid DNA of words. With Immortal Words, Widjaja's visionary and poetic synthesis of art and science reaches a new level where the immortality of DNA, a material that can endure for millions of years, is analogous to the endlessness of our own memories, cultural identity and legacy.

Curatorial Esssay: Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani
Producer: Audrey Koh
Artist: Boedi Widjaja

A public installation of Immortal Words will also be presented at Art SG under the PLATFORM sector.