A Visual Narrative of the Wedding Ceremony in Damar Kurung Paintings

Abstract

Traditional ceremonies in Javanese culture occur according to the phases of human life, starting from mitoni or tingkeban (the seven-months pregnancy ceremony), to baby birth ceremonies, circumcision, marriage and lastly the funeral ceremony. In traditional thinking, marriage is one of the most important phases of life apart from birth and death, because in marriage, two people are united to commit to building a family/household and producing a new generation. In Gresik, East Java, there is a traditional wedding ceremony called Kemanten Joli. This traditional ceremony is rarely held and official documentation about it is difficult to find. An art maestro named Sriati Masmundari has documented this traditional ceremony several times through Damar Kurung paintings. Damar Kurung is a traditional Gresik lantern. Each side of the lantern is decorated with paintings depicting socio-cultural events in Gresik. This was qualitative research with an interpretative descriptive approach, where the visual data of Damar Kurung paintings were analyzed using a visual narrative. Expectation, attention, and memory analysis methods revealed the narrative of the Kemanten Joli wedding ceremony diachronically. The results confirmed that the visual elements in Damar Kurung painting are symbolic and interrelated to produce a complete narrative series. The visual narrative analysis showed that the static paintings can contain dynamic space and time narratives, which can depict the stages of the otherwise undocumented Kemanten Joli wedding ceremony.
 Keywords: visual narrative, wedding ceremony, Damar Kurung, art history