Project: Dhiradj Ramsamoedj, Adji Gilas

By Christopher Cozier



Dhiradj Ramsamoedj holding one of his Adji Gilas cups


September 2009

A few examples of Dhiradj Ramsamoedj’s Adji Gilas cups are placed on the red-oxide-coloured floor of his studio. This is a typical painted floor for a house in Kwatta, west of central Paramaribo, and this looks like a typical cup. We could be in Trinidad or Guyana. He is explaining to me that “adji” means maternal grandmother, and that these aluminium mugs were from her once-active business renting wares for festivities and other events.

Dhiradj points out that the cups still have an “R” written in enamel paint underneath. There are approximately forty of them left. The artist has transferred onto them graphic images derived from early photographs of his grandmother. So this is not just a typical house, or a typical cup: it is Dhiradj’s. We are looking at this work in his grandparents’ home, which has now become his studio or site of investigation. This is a very personal navigation of his experience — his own memory and relationship to family and place.

We are on the inside of his process, and this location is not just a sight to be rendered — not just an image to take to the market, as we see in local art galleries throughout the Caribbean. Most forms of representation in the Caribbean would render the house and the location from a viewpoint across the street, for the touristic or cultural brochures, saying that this is the typical Asian household of this part of the country. It would be a static silenced sign of national diversity or of cultural otherness, accordingly.

But this is Dhiradj’s active site of investigation, of developing personal vocabularies towards sovereign ways of articulating his own lived experiences and stories, from the inside looking out.





I ask him if the work should even leave this site, as the work, the process of minding (caring for) and mining (investigating the symbolic agency of) these intimate elements, this series of actions, resonate within this actual space. They transform the space, which both contains and amplifies their intent. They take on a site-specific implication, and the artist’s actions become differently performative and enabling — not just to me, the viewer, but also to other artists like himself working in places like this everywhere. This is more than just cultural display. This about the artist working his way through what he knows and can understand.

I would like to argue that within this transactional space or moment of exchange we are all transported or altered. So where is Kwatta now within this moment?

Is it in the critical space shaped by his intent, his investigative process, dislodged from narratives of nation, of culture, of cultural display and otherness? Is it an action within the critical space we call the Caribbean, which is just another space where an artist, a creative individual, struggles to understand the world around him- or herself?

After I meet with Dhiradj, he sends me an image by email, in which he arranges the cups — “gilas” — on the internal structural beams of the wooden house, often used as shelves in traditional Caribbean homes. In that single gesture, he weaves together the structural investigations of Remy Jungerman with, of course, Mondrian’s. They are all fair game within his investigative moment.

It is not my intention to create an imbalance, but more to look at the work of Dhiradj as someone whose approach is derived from the current range of influences available to him. This processing and reconfiguring defines the current moment in which many contemporary Surinamese artists are proceeding.




Hindu devotional images in Ramsamoedj's house


Dhiradj Ramsamoedj graduated from the Nola Hatterman Institute in Paramaribo in 2004. His most recent exhibition was Double Feature, together with Kurt Nahar, at the Readytex Art Gallery in August 2009.

Meanwhile: July and August 2009

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Notes on other current and upcoming art events in Suriname and elsewhere



Kon u Taki (mixed media on canvas, 148 x 197 cm, 2009), by Marcel Pinas. Photo by William Tsang, courtesy Readytex Art Gallery


= Double Feature: Marcel Pinas and Sri Irodikromo
Readytex Art Gallery, Paramaribo; July 15 to July 25, 2009

Separate collections by two very different artists, each with a distinctive and unique style, although they each choose a strikingly bright colour palette, regularly use pangi textiles, and work from strong culturally inspired themes.

= The Time: solo exhibition by Robbert Enfield
Royal House of Art, Paramaribo; July 25 to August 8, 2009

“Everybody is affected by the time we are living in. But most of them act as if it doesn’t affect them at all. I want to open people’s eyes, tell the spectators: ‘Don’t hide, don’t pretend.’” --Robbert Enfield, July 2009

= Eat the Frame: with work from René Tosari, Carl Pope, Gean Moreno, Jean Bernard Koeman, Anton Vrede, Hamid el Kanbouhi, Dwight Marica, Eric Reding, Miek Hoekzema, Mirjam Kort, Kaleb de Groot and Moshekwa Langa; curator Michael Tedja
Galerie Nouvelles Images, The Hague, the Netherlands; 27 June to August 22, 2009

As the exhibition Eat the Frame was developing, curator Michael Tedja wrote a fictitious story, Hosselen ("to hustle"). The main character is a young curator busy preparing an international exhibition. His path through life is marked by various twists and turns. The novel is written in facets. Like a diamond, a brilliant which has 58 facets, the book is composed of 58 chapters, each telling a story about art and the art world in the Netherlands. By the end of the book, the young curator steps out of the framework of the story and so exits the fiction. The exhibition is being hosted by Nouvelles Images and the catalogue of the exhibition is the final chapter of Hosselen. Eat the Frame is now a reality

= Licht aan Zee AA: with work from Remy Jungerman, Iris Kensmil, Marcel Pinas, Kurt Nahar, David Bade, Tirzo Martha, Papa Adama, Luan Nel, Vitshois Mwilambwe and Meshac Gaba; curator Georges Hanna, guestcurator Remy Jungerman
De Kunstuitleen, Den Helder, The Netherlands; 1 May to August 29, 2009

The theme of Licht aan Zee AA is culture and cultural differences, with a focus on Africa and the Antilles. Guest curator Remy Jungerman, together with Iris Kensmil and Kurt Nahar, has presented a collection under the title "Born on Wednesday", following the Afro-Surinamese tradition of naming babies after the day they are born.

= Togetherness: solo exhibition by Raimen Bijlhout
Cultureel Centrum Suriname (CCS), Paramaribo; August 7 to 13, 2009

Togetherness is about the "unity of the culture of the Afro-Surinamese urban population and the maroon people in the interior". Bijlhout completed his art education at the Nola Hatterman Art Academy in 2006. In 2008 he had his second solo exhibition, New Beginnings, in the Instituto Venezolano para la Cultura y la Cooperacíon (IVCC).

-- Compiled by Marieke Visser and Priscilla Tosari