Medan

Sound of Medan was created by Indonesians, Rani Fitriana Jambak (b. 1992) and Evi Ovtiana (b. 1992). Residing in Medan, they are both working as freelancers in the creative industries. They first worked together in 2018 when they created a 45min silent movie about the acoustic spheres of Medan – the accompanying movie soundtrack helped blend the film and music together in a live setting. The artists’ core interest is combining traditions and modern influences in order to find new ways of expression that give a perspective on current Indonesia.

Concept

Crossing Indonesia’s third biggest city, Medan, will leave behind one impression in particular: an emerging and dizzying city that is diverse in ethnicities, cultures and religions. The unique quality of Medan is found in the contrasts here: big villas next to simple, wooden huts; mosques next to churches, next to temples; clean and dirty; noisy and peaceful; poor and rich; Asian and globalised; modern and undeveloped. Hence the concept for Sound of Medan is to capture this abundance of diversity and to make the contrasts graspable by the artistic expressions of young Medanese artists, Rani Jambak and Evi Ovtiana. These two Muslim women are paradigmatic for a young generation of Indonesian artists striving to merge contrasts and contradictions as the ones mentioned above, and to elaborate new artistic approaches in order to find their own ways of expression.