Patriot Mukmin, S. Sn., M. Sn. at Bandung Art Contemporary Art Award (BaCAA) #7

Patriot Mukmin, S.Sn., M.Sn., Lecturer in Aesthetics and Art Research Group, Faculty of Art and Design,
Institut Teknologi Bandung received the “Bandung Contemporary Art Award” (BaCAA) which was held at
Lawangwangi Creative Space, Art Sociates (12/8). The competition is open to professional artists who
already have exhibition experience. Approximately 250 applications from participants are sent to the
contest and 140 participants passed the initial judging of eligibility screening.

His award-winning work entitled “Discourses of the Disease” was made in April 2020, during the initial
phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia. However, in the process, he continued to develop it and
completed it in 2022. In the first stage, during the PSBB period on March 2020, he took the initiative to
make a video work through Instagram where he invited friends to participate. The idea is to deconstruct
fake news circulating in society regarding COVID-19. The method is to recite the words in the selected
hoax news simultaneously. This process breaks the syntagm chain of the sentence so that the hoax is
meaningless. This idea was adopted from the concept of syntagm-associative in Ferdinand de Saussure’s
Semiotics. This part of the work can be seen in the video displayed on the cellphone as well as the
lenticular print on the work.

In the second part, there are 384 printed QR codes surrounding the work. Each QR code contains a record
of his daily location from April 1, 2020, to April 19, 2021. For 384 days, he routinely recorded the
locations of the places he visited every day. This idea was executed with the thought that if he was
infected by the virus, he could track it down and provide info for the people he met in the log. The record
ended when he got the second COVID-19 vaccine, after which he was asked to install the care-protect
application and record his location in the application.

“Through this work, I realized that my actions were initially driven by fear of the pandemic. But
subconsciously, I have also become an agent of the dominant discourse regarding COVID-19. As the
philosopher Michel Foucault said that “Discourse disciplines subjects into certain ways of thinking and
acting”, the two parts of my work are then shown together to convey the same message: that in every
major event there must be a ‘war’ discourse to discipline human subjects.”, said Patriot Mukmin, S.Sn.,
M.Sn.

He hoped that this work will serve as a sign of the times for the challenges that humanity has
encountered over the past two years and how, with God’s help, we may overcome them.