{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/taring-padis-star-is-on-the-rise-feature-adeline-chia/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":127029,"slug":"taring-padis-star-is-on-the-rise-feature-adeline-chia","title":"Taring Padi: Action – Nonstop","excerpt":"Why is the artworld so hungry for their panoramic visions of mass resistance?","content":"\n

With exhibitions across three continents over the past three years, Indonesian collective Taring Padi’s post-Documenta star is steadily on the rise. Why is the artworld so hungry for their panoramic visions of mass resistance – or plain old agitprop?

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For an art collective whose first European outing ended in ignominy – being accused of anti-Semitism, having their artwork removed and being dragged through the mud online and off – Taring Padi is, four years after the fallout of Documenta 15, having its moment in the sun. Western institutions seem to have moved on from that controversy, or at least rationalised it as a kink on the neverending road of cultural understanding and exchange, and are hungry for the Yogyakarta-based collective’s brand of activism and art.

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Perhaps the appeal is precisely its work’s lack of ambiguity. At a time of ongoing systemic injustice and murky, protracted political solutions, Taring Padi offers a clarifying moral simplicity. Taring Padi means fang of the rice in Indonesian, the spike at the end of the husk of the grain staple – an image of the many teeth of the agrarian, or more broadly working, classes. Their trademark largescale banners, designed to be carried during protest marches or hung in village halls, teem with dense interlocking scenes of farmers, factory workers, students and Indigenous people fighting corrupt landowners, capitalist landgrabbers, dictators and war criminals. It is the classic story of the underdog fighting the evil hegemon; the power of collective action versus concentrated power.

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Whether or not you are 100 percent onboard with calling such didactic and functional work ‘art’ – its certainty runs counter to the almost requisite ambiguity of Western modern and contemporary aesthetics – Taring Padi’s old-school leftie visions of revolutionary struggle have found new currency outside Indonesia. In recent years they have exhibited and collaborated in Thailand, Italy, Australia, Brazil, the UK and the Netherlands. At Ibraaz in London, Rakyat Pasti Menang (The People United Will Never Be Defeated), the first of three chronological solo exhibitions, brings together works from the collective’s founding years during the late 1990s. Battered, creased, repeatedly folded and showing evidence of moth-nibbling, these painted banners wear their marks of use with pride: they were protest props carried by student activists demanding democracy and radical social change during the final years of military-general-turned-president Suharto’s New Order regime (1966–98).

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Taring Padi in Yogyakarta, c. 2009. Courtesy the artists
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Taring Padi at the Karnaval Rakyat Anti Militerisme (KARAM/People’s Carnival Against Militarism) protest in Jakarta, 2000. Courtesy the artists
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The practical use-value of their work can sit awkwardly with their stately presentations in gallery spaces. In Venice earlier this summer, however, audiences could see both lives of the work. People’s Liberation at SALE Docks featured six recent People’s Justice banners, made with communities, collectives and individuals aligned with progressive causes, alongside linocut posters and cardboard puppets. During the Venice Biennale, a labour strike and march protesting the Biennale’s hosting of the Israeli Pavilion mobilised posters and banners created by the collective bearing slogans including ‘No Blood in Our Canals, No Blood at Venice Biennale’ and ‘Art Does Not Normalise Genocide’.

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This circulation between gallery and protest matters because Taring Padi considers itself a group of activists first and artists second. The collective, whose changing roster now comprises 19 people, has stated since its founding in 1998 that art is a political tool. According to the manifesto laid out on their website, art is meant to be ‘channeling the people’s desires and needs and prioritizing openness, social prosperity, the sovereignty of the people, justice between generations, democracy, the appreciation of human rights without dismissing responsibilities, gender perspectives, the reformation of global relations and the preservation of a good environment’. To celebrate Taring Padi as contemporary art is also, potentially, to domesticate an enterprise whose purpose has always exceeded, and at times opposed, the contemporary art system.

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Adil dan Beradab (detail), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 300 × 300 cm. Photo: Muhammad Fadli. Courtesy the artists
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Of course, the work can be discussed formally. The monumental People’s Justice banners, for example, have a distinct visual identity and narrative logic: dense, interlocking scenes in which antagonists are often placed on opposing sides. Between them might stand a symbolic structure – the life-sustaining olive tree in No. 7 (2024), dedicated to Palestinian liberation, or a sixteenth-century Dutch colonial ship in No. 4 (2023), whose passage through the image connects colonial extraction to contemporary generals and greedy developers.

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But practical criticism aside, these works are basically propaganda. Member Bayu Widodo explains to ArtReview that the group sees that “art is a form of political education”: it is meant to edify and galvanise. The banners operate like gigantic billboards-cum-textbooks that travel in order to explain a cause. Posters and placards condense arguments into images and slogans. Their trademark lifesize wayang kardus, or cardboard puppets, enlarge a crowd, provide shade and offer a degree of protection: as Ladija Triana half-jokes, something with which to bat away a tear-gas canister.

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These objects are what writers Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee term ‘social movement culture’ in their book Signs of Change (2010), which covers the creative output of international social movements, in the form of banners, posters and other visual materials. Distinct from both art and design, such objects are produced with characteristics such as a lack of individual authorship and collaborative ways of image-making, which are all Taring Padi trademarks. The collective freely shares its methods through wayang kardus workshops, teaching participants how to construct political narratives and build the puppets themselves. “There’s no patent,” says photographer Raung ‘Bebe’ Singasari. “We don’t keep the gate.”

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Rakyat Pasti Menang, 2026, installation view detail. Photo: Ollie Hammick. Courtesy the artists and Ibraaz, London
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So why is the artworld turning to Taring Padi now? Part of the answer may be the expanding legitimacy of cultural practices that activist and writer Gregory Sholette calls the artworld’s ‘dark matter’: the huge field of amateur art, DIY publishing and social-movement ephemera historically excluded from formal art institutions.

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But their appeal may also lie in how different it looks from the gentle participatory social practices that have become familiar within those institutions. In an Artnet interview, Taring Padi member Alexander Supartono observes the differences between Taring and another Indonesian collective: ‘ruangrupa is more urban and cutting-edge and Taring Padi is more traditional and typical left-wing’. Perhaps the old-fashioned ‘message art’ and ideological directness of Taring Padi bypasses the commonplace criticism of the now-prevalent social practice art that has vaguely progressive aims and whose activities often stand in for rather than critique real public services – community organising, educational workshops, cooperative farming and so on. In critic Ben Davis’s words, such works are ‘mopping up the symptoms of social problems instead of going after the disease itself’ – papering over social cracks, rather than seeking to reform society itself.

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Photo: Muhammad Fadli
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Taring Padi has always claimed to go after the disease; they seek social justice, not amelioration. And although their work is inseparable from political action, it does not substitute for it. So Taring Padi’s work is interesting not despite being propaganda, but because it is willing to be propaganda – in support of a greater political cause. In its heady early years, their working model offered an inspirational picture of art and activism combining to produce dramatic change: Taring Padi produced satirical woodblock posters and pamphlets denouncing corruption and militarism, and shadow puppets lampooning political figures, and its members took part in the student uprisings that helped bring down the dictator Suharto.

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But this is where the romance of activist art runs into history. The Reformasi period that followed Suharto’s rule struggled to sustain enough pressure to prevent democratic regression. Suharto’s former son-in-law, former general Prabowo Subianto, is now president; last year, he controversially named Suharto an official national hero. Taring Padi’s post-Reformasi trajectory offers not a triumphant model of art changing the world but a more sobering and realistic one: political art as a long, fitful struggle in which victories can be partial, temporary or even reversed.

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Over time, the collective has widened its causes, protesting environmental pollution and racism, advocating gender and LGBTQ+ equality, and denouncing atrocities including the 1965 mass killings that targeted members of the Communist Party in Indonesia. It also began longer engagements with local communities. In Siring Barat, East Java, Taring Padi supported villagers seeking compensation from the Lapindo Brantas company after the 2006 mud disaster, when a drilling-well blowout buried homes, displaced more than 30,000 people and polluted the environment with heavy metals. On the fourth anniversary, the collective held etching, screenprinting and painting workshops, culminating in a carnival and performance beside the dam containing the toxic mud. Twenty years later, not all victims have been compensated. Art can accompany a struggle, give it images, language and solidarity, but it cannot guarantee justice.

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In the past few years, Taring Padi entered their ‘international friendship’ era. During a one-month residency in Brazil, four members of Taring Padi developed a new work with Casa do Povo and the Brazilian landless workers movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, which was shown at Framer Framed. In 2024 they produced new works in collaboration with the Indigenous Australian artist collective ProppaNOW.

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On top of the bridge-building, they have received a degree of artworld respectability. In 2018 the collective celebrated its 20th anniversary with a retrospective at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta, and is being collected by international museums such as London’s Tate Modern. It’s a long way from their radical roots and operations outside the art system, which they had earlier condemned as elitist and bourgeois.

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‘If fuel prices go up… We stop paying taxes’, 2003, woodcut print on paper, 32 × 51 cm. Courtesy the artists
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Museums can turn protest objects into cultural capital, but they also provide money, visibility and networks that feed back into activist work. Taring Padi seems aware of this bargain, treating the institution as another platform for their activities – provided that the institutions are not-for-profit, committed to public education and without links to toxic philanthropy. Its internal economics also preserves an egalitarian idea of labour: for each sale, everyone who contributed is listed, including the in-house chef, and the group collectively decides how earnings are split. Time spent painting can be measured on a timesheet, but even that runs into a philosophical question concerning labour. “How about people who conceptualised the work?” Ladija asks, laughing. “They were not painting, but they were thinking. Isn’t thinking also part of work?”

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At the end of the interview, someone takes out four stickers based on reproductions of woodcut prints the collective made in 2003 after then-president Megawati Soekarnoputri raised fuel prices by 22 percent. Taring Padi joined the demonstrations, flyposting the prints and turning them into placards. One depicts four workers leaving the office, one of them wearing a belt with a star on the buckle while his T-shirt sports the image of a raised fist. The text says in Indonesian: ‘If fuel prices go up… We stop paying taxes.’ In another sticker, on the right, we see ordinary women raising ladles and pots in protest; on the left, a
woman wearing a crown lounging on a throne. Her bodyguard has a dog’s face. The text reads: ‘Stop monopolising people’s power/ The people’s assets are sold off/ Corruptors’ assets remain untouched.’ More than 20 years later, rising fuel prices and living costs have made these old images newly relevant again. In June, Indonesia raised nonsubsidised fuel prices by roughly 32 percent, driven by soaring global crude oil costs following the Iran war and a weaker rupiah. Taring Padi intends to distribute the stickers during ‘Jogja Last Friday Ride’, an unofficial monthly cycling event in Yogyakarta. One of the group’s founding members, Mohamad ‘Ucup’ Yusuf, returns to a question I asked earlier about what keeps them going. He had said, “Solidarity.” Now he adds, “How can we stop?” He gestures to the reproductions of the old protest images. “We can’t stop when all this doesn’t stop.”

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Rakyat Pasti Menang (The People United Will Never Be Defeated) is on show at Ibraaz, London, through 22 November

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From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

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Read next Who’s Exploiting Who? ruangrupa on documenta fifteen

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