How can the biennale format move beyond surface politics of representation? By presenting artistic practice as a productive form of research and documentation, says Kathleen Ditzig
Do we live in the same playground? is an acid-laced provocation. It stings of the resentment accumulated through years of systematic marginalisation. Indeed, focusing on Indonesia in particular and Southeast Asia more generally, its curators – Akiq AW, Arham Rahman and Penwadee Nophaket Manont – use this rhetorical question to foreground the underprivileged and the forgotten through the work of 52 artists from the region. But unlike other exhibitions that address Southeast Asia as a spatial periphery of an international artworld, this one posits that ‘Southeast Asia’ as a geopolitical construct creates, in and of itself, other peripheries that require attention. In this context, ‘the periphery’ is not a place as much as it is the communities that live within the category of ‘Southeast Asia’ but don’t benefit from that construction, while still suffering from the histories of neoliberalism out of which Southeast Asia, as a regional trade zone and geographic entity, was created. Do we live in the same playground? is neither your typical international nor regional biennale.
Yet, it is a biennale in all the ways that make biennales important discursive spaces and curatorial platforms. Presented across three main locations including Taman Budaya and Jogja National Museum, the exhibition privileges artworks that highlight lesser-known subjectivities as well as practices that are informed by long-term engagements with communities and lived experiences from the region. Bali-born Citra Sasmita’s Timur Merah Project: The Embrace of My Motherland (2019), for example, is an installation comprising suspended spice bags, text written in turmeric on the floor and scrolls that recall Kamasan paintings – a waning tradition of Balinese painting that illustrates canonical Javanese narratives such as the stories of Panji Malat, or the Indian epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Citra herself learned the form through meeting Mangku Murray, a Kamasan painter in Bali. Her installation reimagines the kakawin (a formal Javanese court literature fusing Hindu mythology and accounts of contemporary court life), originally written by male authors and articulating patriarchal rule, by shifting the attention to women as active protagonists in these stories.
Similarly, Yosep Arizal’s largescale installation Tanggalan Barohiwiyah (2019) appropriates a 15-day calendar system (taken from a Javanese divination manual found in the artist’s home) that instructs its (presumably male) reader on how to arouse a woman prior to sex. In Yosep’s version of the manual’s drawings, however, a man is the object of desire. These drawings are accompanied by a large, wall-mounted yonic sculpture that narrates the calendar to its viewers. Given the strict governance of public space in Indonesia, such a display would not be possible outside of the relatively liberal spaces of Yogyakarta. As such, the inclusion of works such as those by Yosep and Citra speaks not only to a feminist attempt to address the historical and societal obscuring of women, but also to the political potency of this biennale.
The exhibition’s most poignant political gesture, however, is Moelyono’s Pembangunan Taman Monumen Marsinah (The Establishment of Marsinah Monument Park) (1993–2019), an homage to labour-activist Marsinah from Sidoarjo, East Java, who was raped and murdered on 8 May 1993. Taking the form of a monument housed in a space that emulates a public square, it includes a video, a commemorative plaque and make-shift wreath, images of Marsinah plastered on walls and a suspended body covered in a sack. Originally intended to be exhibited in Surabaya 20 years ago, it was censored due to its critique of Suharto’s brutal repression of labour protests. Marsinah’s killing, linked to her role as a representative for a workers’ protest at the Indonesian watch factory at which she worked, brought international criticism to bear on Suharto’s regime.
Beyond the astute use of the exhibition as a space to address lacunae in mainstream discourse and history, the most rewarding aspect of the exhibition is its dedication to the difficult task of presenting artistic practice as a productive form of research and documentation. Gan Siong King’s Kecek Amplifier (2019) is historiography as a stylised video, interspersed with technical facts about synthesisers and jokes based on a conversation with Malaysian artist Nik Shazwan. Elsewhere, a room is dedicated to the exhibition of the late Roslisham Ismail’s final artwork (the Malaysian artist, also known as Ise, died this past July), Langkasuka: Journey Part One, which presents and unpacks the research and discussions he had undertaken with artists Chan Fei Meng and Imran Taib, exploring the culinary history of the Ancient Malay Kingdom Langkasuka that spanned Southern Thailand and the east coast of Malaysia, and is believed to have been founded during the second century.
Building on this, the biennale particularly privileges new research based on direct engagement with communities and their lived experiences. For example, a commissioning programme (the Residensi Kelana programme) provided artists Ferial Afif, Tajriani Thalib and Ipeh Nur with the opportunity to study the rituals, belief systems, archives and oral traditions of different communities, in search of everything from forgotten Sumatran heroines to traditional rumah betang houses to the maritime lifestyles of the village of Pambusuang in West Sulawesi.
The exhibition is at its strongest when it commits itself to the presentation of such practices and seeks to circumvent direct representations. But even when it does present artworks more concerned with a symbolic decolonisation of representation rather than an address to material realities, the curatorial gesture reverberates with political intent.
The inclusion of Khairulddin Wahab’s Native Malay in Landscapes Apart from Painting (2014–), a series of self-portraits of the artist in traditional Malay attire against the backdrop of the rolling hills of the British countryside, is less interesting as a literal subversion of colonial photography than for the fact that Khairulddin is the only Malay Singaporean artist selected for this exhibition – speaking, perhaps, to the obscurity of the Malay minority in Singapore’s colonial and neocolonial histories.
Do we live in the same playground? is a radical proposal for what a biennale can be and how curatorial gestures can be mobilised to move beyond the surface politics of representation. And in that respect, it is a strong case study for how the biennale format can still be a sandbox in which we all want to play.
Biennale Jogja XV Equator: Do we live in the same playground?, various venues, Yogyakarta, 20 October – 30 November 2020
From the Spring 2020 issue of ArtReview Asia
