Contemporary Jakarta: A tale of two art events

| Elly Kent
 + Art Jakarta 2024  Photo: Jinpanji, courtesy Archive of Art Jakarta.

Contemporary Jakarta: A tale of two art events

Contemporary Jakarta: A Tale Of Two Art Events | Elly Kent

In 2024 the city of Jakarta contemplated the imminent loss of its national capital status as the new capital city, Nusantara, emerges in distant East Kalimantan. The city also weathered a controversial election process at the national level. A key orchestrator of the New Order’s military “disappearances” was elected as the new president and the city went back to the polls to elect the Jakarta city governor at the end of November.1 In amongst this dynamic social and political landscape, Jakarta’s two premiere art events opened their doors in the first week of October 2024, marking important milestones in the city’s cultural landscape.

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Contemporary Art in Jakarta, 2024: a Historic Anniversary

The year 2024 also signalled fifty years of intense engagement with contemporary art and its related debates, discourses and polemics in Jakarta. The half century timespan begins with two interrelated and landmark events in 1974; the establishment of the Jakarta Biennale’s precursor, the Pameran Besar Seni Lukis Indonesia 1974 (Major Exhibition of Indonesian Painting) and the sustained response from emerging artists to the dominance of decorative painting in the arts establishment of the time. The initial reaction took the shape in the Desember Hitam (Black December) statement, penned by a group of art school students and sent, along with floral tribute to the Pameran Besar, expressing their ‘Condolences on the death of Indonesian painting’. The statement, which among its criticisms implored painters to ‘be oriented to the realities of social life and political-economic culture’, prompted the director of the Repubic of Indonesia’s Academy of Art to warn students to leave these matters to students of sociology and economics, because mixing them up with art was ‘very dangerous’. The students, including FX Harsono, were expelled, and several lecturers who defended them were also dismissed.2 It is worth noting the director was not incorrect in this statement. Less than a decade prior in 1965-66, the mass slaughter, detention and disappearance of suspected Communist sympathisers across Indonesia had decimated artist communities, especially targeting those who aligned with the values of social realism. The political administration that rose to power through this extreme violence, the New Order, continued to censor, beat, and imprison writers, artists and musicians who criticised the government until the end of its regime.3

In the following year, 1975, the manifestation of this youthful, artistic discontent appeared in the eponymously titled first exhibition of the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia (New Indonesian Art Movement, later shorted to GSRB). Evolved in part from Desember Hitam, and comprised of a number of artists who today represent some of Indonesia’s most successful artist on the national and international stage.4 GSRB declared itself to be ‘striving for a more alive art, in the sense of demanding attention, natural, useful, a living reality throughout the whole spectrum of society.’5 Their works incorporated found objects, a strong influence from commercial and vernacular design, and were accompanied by published essays, polemical debates between critics and a rapidly evolving sense of what could be and who it was for. By 1989, GSRB member Sanento Yuliman was included in the jury for the exhibition, which had adopted Biennale in its title seven years earlier. After a hiatus of four years, the 1993 Biennale was curated by another prominent GSRB member, Jim Supangkat.

Both of these pivotal exhibitions—Pameran Besar and Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia were held in Jakarta’s iconic Taman Ismail Marzuki Arts Centre, still home to the Jakarta Biennale today. In the years since this complex aesthetic discourse rocked—and helped establish—the Indonesian contemporary art scene, the city has developed a flourishing, if sometimes inconsistent, scene that spans the spectrum from top commercial galleries and private art museums through to publicly funded galleries, artist run initiatives, and a thriving street art scene operating alongside street markets filled with ubiquitous landscape and still-life paintings. The national motto of unity in diversity is apt, if perhaps leaning a little more to diversity in the soon-to-be-replaced national capital.

The Establishment: Jakarta Biennale 

This diversity has been a key feature of the Jakarta Biennale, which is auspiced by the long-standing Dewan Kesenian Jakarta (DKJ, the Jakarta Arts Council). For the past ten years the Biennale’s implementation has been in the hands of one or another arm of the now internationally renowned artists’ collective ruangrupa. Founded in 2000 as an informal collective of creative practitioners collaborating within a horizontal and de-hierarchised structure, ruangrupa is now firmly at the top of Jakarta’s art establishment. By the 2020s, ruangrupa had given their concept of cooperative, collective and decentralised curatorship a nostalgically agrarian tag of lumbung (communal grain store). Lumbung has dominated Indonesian arts discourse and courtesy of ruangrupa’s role as artistic directors of documenta15 the concept has since had a significant impact on global art discourses of ethics and aesthetics.6 In Indonesia lumbung has also dominated state-sponsored cultural events, including the 2023 Pekan Budaya Nasional (National Culture Week), with founding ruangrupa member Ade Darmawan as the Chair of its Curatorial Council.

The term lumbung is less prominent in the 2024 Jakarta Biennale, which opened two years and ten months after the preceding Biennale closed. But the exhibition organisers have adopted one of the methodological approaches embedded in ruangrupa’s direction of documenta15, the majelis, which can loosely be translated as a committee or council. The Jakarta Biennale’s majelis is in turn made up of 18 artists associations and collectives, largely from Java. Nonetheless, the presentations at Taman Ismail Marzuki and in other venues across the city include representation from artists and collectives throughout the archipelago. Attending on the first weekend after the opening in early October, I was struck first by the throngs of young Jakartans filtering past the artworks, stopping for selfies and intrigued by the works that invited participation. My second impression was that, after some years of following a more or less conventional approach to exhibition making—with strong public communications, a long lead time, clearly articulated curatorial direction, and visitor—and artwork—friendly exhibition design, the 2024 Jakarta Biennale lacked cohesion.

 + Pasang Surut Kejayaan (the ebb and flow of greatness) Wiyoga Muhardanto X Komunitas Sikukeluang, 2024. PVC sheets, resin, fibreglass, acrylic paint; video documentation of performance 2’58”. 55 x 31 x 22 cm.

Many of the works were excellent. Pasang Surut Kejayaan (2024, the ebb and flow of greatness), Wiyoga Muhardanto’s collaboration with Komunitas Sikukeluang from Pekanbaru city in Riau Province, struck a whimsical and thought-provoking note with its miniature model version of the Pekanbaru home of the last Sultan of the Siak kingdom, seen in a video touring the city on the back of a motorbike. Anisa Nabilla Khairo from Padang in Sumatra and Rumah Cikaramat collected plates from the Cikaramat community and displayed them with family photographs, as if set for a feast. Spanned on either side by an artful arrangement of the woven trays and baskets used for sifting and serving rice, the work titled Alam Takambang Jadi Guru (2024, nature is a teacher) alluded to connection between nature, body and community as sources of knowledge. Mengairi Sekitar, Memaknai Sekumpulan (2024, water the surroundings, give meaning to a gathering), by collective Gulung Tukar from West Java and Susur Galur from West Kalimantan, allowed visitors to control the parameters of a digitised cartographic view of four riverside communities in Pontianak, which was projected from the ceiling onto a thin layer of water. As visitors manipulated a mini-mixing desk, the mapped communities would appear to be inundated or left in drought. But this remarkable immersive experience, like Spotless Future, by Tepian Kolektif (East Kalimantan) and Forum Sudutpandang (Central Sulawesi)—an invitation to walk across sand and lean into a sound installation and projected image—seemed let down by the lighting, location and access afforded it by the exhibition design. At times sparse, and at other times crowded, there was little to help the visitor navigate and understand the connections between works.

 + Alam Takambang Jadi Guru (nature is a teacher) Anisa Nabilla Khairo X Rumah Cikaramat, 2024. weaving, dynamo and gears, bell, fabric and plates . 12 x 3 x 3m.

Emerging into an adjacent building, we were suddenly in the Taiwan section of the 2024 Biennale, where the well-considered presentation of photography, moving image, prints and drawings revealed stories of Indigenous Taiwanese communities and their connections to place and environment. The relief of a legible exhibition language was palpable, and served to highlight how the exhibition design in the main building detracted from the impact of otherwise stimulating and engaging artworks.

My first visit to the Jakarta Biennale in 2013 was wild, but Ade Darmawan and Hafiz Rancajale’s (respectively artistic director and lead curator, and both founding members of ruangrupa) ‘Siasat’, or ‘tactics’ theme was almost watertight. An extensive catalogue revealed how the artworks, residencies, performances, projects and interventions examined how individuals and communities, especially in urban Indonesia, utilise tactics to cope with social inequality, environmental pressure and poverty. Presented in the basement of Taman Ismail Marzuki and at an impressive range of sites across the city, it was a masterclass in experimental exhibition making, an outcome that is not yet evident in the majelis approach deployed for the Biennale’s fiftieth anniversary.7

And on the Other Side (Of Town) Art Jakarta 2024

By contrast, Art Jakarta 2024 gave every appearance of being a well-oiled machine. Fair director Tom Tandio’s stewardship of Art Jakarta through the interruptions of the pandemic and into a risky, but apparently successful move to an outer-Jakarta location appears to have attracted enormous private investment. The creative vision of artistic director Enin Supriyanto—himself an icon of the Jakarta art scene and beyond—has lent the commercial fair social capital among established and emerging artists and collectives. Innovations such as the AJ SCENE, a section dedicated to artist collectives, studios, creative producers and community projects, and AJ SPOT, where commissioned installations from established Indonesian artists disrupt the commercial atmosphere of the main hall, give Art Jakarta a distinctive flavour that allows it to retain credibility within the less commercial elements of the art scene it serves (and serves up). Enin’s creative control and drive to ensure the fair ‘gives back’ to the scene extends as far as a policy that proscribes mere sponsorship or advertising—commercial partners who want visibility inside Art Jakarta can only do so in collaboration with an artist, through a matching process directed by Enin himself.

My first visit to Art Jakarta’s precursor, the ultimately financially unviable Bazaar Art, was also in 2013, and an uninspiring one at that. Held in the Pacific Place Ballroom in Jakarta’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, my abiding memory is of how utterly dominant the extravagant hotel décor was. The rich orange, patterned carpet and glittering chandeliers sucked away any hint of the aesthetic impact the artworks may have had. I have few memories of the art on display, although contemporary media reports remind me that it included a ‘premium living interior exhibition’, and works from the private collection of Deddy Kusuma, now the Chair of the Board of Patrons for Art Jakarta.8 Shifting from the Ritz-Carlton to the Jakarta Convention centre in 2019, with an increasingly accomplished team overseeing high quality lighting, installation and general presentation, the artworks are now what stands out at Art Jakarta (if you could see past the crowds of a reported 38,628 visitors over three days).

Unlike Yogyakarta’s art fair, ArtJOG, which features no booths, no sales, and no gallery representation, much of Art Jakarta looks like a conventional trade fair; 73 local and international galleries present works by the artists they represent in stalls separated by temporary white walls. Most spaces in the fair resembled mini-white cube spaces repurposed as shopfronts, turning over work as buyers make their purchases. Others, like ISA Art, added a layer of curatorial intent, which explored ‘how artists confront and rise above life’s inherent challenges through their creative endeavours.’9 Represented in ISA’s stable, Berlin-based Australian-Indonesian artist Ida Lawrence presented her witty paintings melding pattern and text, Sydney-based Indonesian artist Jumaadi showed works from his long-running exploration of shadow puppets created from buffalo hide, while Indonesian artist Trio Muharam’s ongoing Under Construction (2024) series featured glittering, gold-fronted lightboxes with cut-out text declaring cynical statements seemingly tailor-made to critique the art fair. Other galleries choose a more project-based approach, like Galeri Zen1’s intriguing collaboration between two established artists from Yogyakarta. The special project brought together Mulyana’s colourful crocheted reef and Yudi Sulistiyono’s intricate paper-crafted battleship-cum-shanty town, sparking the imagination of both children collectors ready to make offers well over a quarter of a million USD. International representatives, such as ShanghART, also offered high-impact conceptual projects. With galleries in Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore, their artist of choice was Singaporean Robert Zhao Renhui, whose immersive New Forest (2024) drew on the same themes as Seeing Forest, his project for the Singapore pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

 + Mannerist Manifest Mulyana X Yudi Sulistiyono, 2024. Photo: Jinpanji, courtesy Archive of Art Jakarta. Crocheted yarn, paper, acrylic paint. dimensions variable.

Nonetheless, Art Jakarta is an art fair, and for every thought-provoking installation and carefully curated collection, there is a space dedicated to oversized, colour-saturated paintings of pop-icons (human and otherwise), glittering figurative sculptures destined to reside in magnificent stairwells, and stunning, lightly rendered canvases that could clad the entire façade of an average working class Jakarta home. The intervention of the SPOT section contrasts with the sometimes-vacuous offerings of the commercial art scene, injecting socio-political commentary through large scale installations that would normally be more at home amongst the earnest offerings of Jakarta Biennale.

In 2024 SPOT featured works from an all-male lineup, addressing issues of state intervention on the environment and society, the impact of climate change, and the confluence of memory, art history and colonisation. Presented by ROH galleries, Syaiful Garibaldi’s Antara Muara (between the river mouth, 2024) was a towering construction made from timber, mangrove roots and other debris left behind by a West Javanese village that is slowly sinking under rising sea waters. Similarly, Iwan Yusuf’s Air Pasang (presented by Nadi Gallery) is a massive boxlike construction, formed from plastic waste and fishing nets that had washed up when king tide waves hit malls on a strip of reclaimed coast in the north Sulawesi capital, Manado in 2021.

 + Antara Muara Syaiful Garibaldi, 2024. Photo: Jinpanji, courtesy Archive of Art Jakarta. Wood, mycelium leather. 2.5 x 2.5 x 4m.

Well-known for his environmental activism, Tisna Sanjaya (presented by ArtSociates) this time took a broader view, reflecting on the erosion of the value of knowledge and culture as Indonesia’s political and bureaucratic elite line their dynastic nests. His typically complex installation, titled Ganjel (Wedge), featured a sculptural portrait of the newly elected President Prabowo (once better known for his role in ‘disappearing’ student activists in the late 1990s) carrying vice-president Gibran (son of erstwhile president Jokowi) on his shoulders, the pair balance atop a stack of folders that contain decades of documents collected during Tisna’s time as an academic in the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Institute of Technology, Bandung. The final SPOT artist for 2024 was Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, whose fascination for the intersection between memory and history has produced a range of stunning projects over the past decade. Dismantling Nostalgia (presented by Kohesi Initiatives) comprises an enormous patchwork background stitched together from strips of the ubiquitous tropical landscape paintings found in street markets and hotel rooms in Bali and Java; in the foreground a white horse rears atop a plinth, the rider bearing trumpet and flag. The arresting image, which borrows from both the powerful anti ‘mooi Indie’ (beautiful Indies) discourse that accompanied the development of modernism in Indonesia, and foundational myths of the proto-nationalist horse-riding hero, Prince Diponegoro, both represent concepts which have become synonymous with notions of anti-colonialism in contemporary art. The anti-mooi indie theme carries strong cadence in contemporary art, appearing in Tisna’s work and again in a series of paintings by Faisal Azhari Palito Perak, in the stand sponsored by philanthropic stalwart, finance organisation UOB. 

 + Installation view, Art Jakarta 2024 , 2024. Includes: Tisna Sanjaya, ‘Ganjel (chock/wedge)’ (foreground) and Timoteus Anggawan Kusno 'Dismantling Nostalgia' (background), Photo: Jinpanji, courtesy Archive of Art Jakarta.
 + Dismantling Nostalgia Timoteus Anggawan Kusno 2024. Photo: Jinpanji, courtesy Archive of Art Jakarta. Patched archival prints, oil and acrylic paintings on canvas, ropes, metal scaffolding. 410 x 310cm.

UOB is also the sponsor of the UOB Painting of the Year award, and the 2023 winner, Ni Nyoman Sani presented a participatory children’s making activity, We are all Beautiful in the UOB Art Space and Play at this year’s Art Jakarta. These commercial partnerships-cum-creative collaborations—such as that between vehicle manufacturer Mini and artist Erwin Windu Pranata, or science, art and technology collective HoNF and Johnnie Walker Blue Label—elevate commercial sponsorship to new creative heights, and undoubtedly contribute to Art Jakarta’s ongoing financial viability. But they can also seem pitched at the higher-income end of the visitorship, and some, like the Julius Baer’s VIP lounge (featuring the paintings of Bandung establishment artist Sunaryo) do so quite overtly.

 + Ketok Mejik  Erwin Windu Pranata, 2024. Photo: Jinpanji, courtesy Archive of Art Jakarta. Installation view.

On the other side of the coin, on its departure from the Ritz-Carlton, Art Jakarta also introduced the SCENE section, where collectives, artist run initiatives, booksellers, merchandisers and other art entrepreneurs can directly access to the commercial market by responding to an open-call for participants. The SCENE booths are tiny by comparison to the mainstream section of the fair, but in 2023 their prime location next to the entrance/exit made the social buzz they generated unavoidable. In 2024 an extra wing was added to accommodate the SCENE, the public program stage and the food and beverage stalls. The new set-up retained some, but not all, of the sociable atmosphere of the 2023 edition with the grid arrangement leaving some stalls in the dark end of the room on the way to nowhere in particular. However, Broken White Project (BWP) Value, the ‘affordable art’ arm of Yogyakarta’s Ace House Collective did a roaring trade in their central, corner position by the stage, offering small, affordable art works from some of Indonesia’s top artists. Art Jakarta seems a natural home for BWP Value, which builds on Ace House’s Ace Mart project from 2015, which developed in response to Yogyakarta’s own pseudo-commercial art fair, ArtJog. Commenting on the tendency for ostensibly commercial trade fairs to ‘spice up their sales’ with heavy themes and discourses (the 2015 iteration of ArtJog was titled “Fluxus”), Ace Mart was a 24-hour grocery store of affordable art.10 Of course, Ace House is far from a small player in the Indonesian art scene, with founding member Uji ‘Hahan’ Handoko also represented elsewhere in a SPOT collaboration (Uji ‘Hahan’ Handoko and Esa System with Artotel Wanderlust: Pelantang).

 +  BWP Value stall, in the SCENE section of Art Jakarta 2024.

There were no heavy overarching themes spicing up Art Jakarta 2024, but according to Enin Supriyanto the annual event finds its niche in ensuring it feeds the roots of the local art scene while working to grow a vibrant art market by attracting new, young collectors from Indonesia’s growing upper-middle class. Art Jakarta, like other art fairs in the nation, appear to be building a consistent, sustainable offering for both the market and established and emerging artists and galleries. Meanwhile publicly funded programs like biennials and other major exhibitions are vulnerable to the waxing and waning of political will and attendant government funding, and dependence on leadership from key figures rather than the development of resilient institutions and succession planning. After expected government grant funding rounds failed to open in mid-2024, and with biennials across Java appearing to experience setbacks, the urge to develop an art market that can support both emerging and established artists is ever more urgent in Indonesia.


Notes

1. See Marcus Mietzner, ‘Jokowi’s Pyrrhic Victory: Indonesia’s 2024 Elections and the Political Reinvention of Prabowo Subianto,’ Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, Vol. 46 No. 2, 2024, pp. 187-215; Usman Hamid, ‘False Hope and Broken Promises: Jokowi’s Human Rights Agenda – A Commentary’ in The International Quarterly for Asian Studies.  Politics of Marginalisation in Indonesia: The Jokowi Era, Vol. 55 No. 2 2024 https://doi.org/10.11588/iqas.2024.2.27206

2. Brita Miklouho-Maklai, Exposing Society’s Wounds, Some Aspects of Contemporary Art since 1966, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, 1991, pp. 23-24.

3. For a detailed account of the impact of this “New Order” period on art and artists, see Elly Kent, Virginia Hooker and Caroline Turner, ‘Contextualising Art in Indonesia’s History, Society and Politics,’ Living art: Indonesian artists engage politics, society and history. Canberra, ANU Press, 2022, pp. 54-69. For a more specific focus on the New Order’s impact on women artist, see Alia Swastika, ‘New Order Policies on Art/Culture and Their Impact on Women’s Roles in Visual Arts, 1970s-90s,’ pp. 249-271 in the same volume.

4. In 1975 the group included FX Harsono, Jim Supangkat, Dede Eri Supria, Nyoman Nuarta, Siti Adiyati Subangun, Hardi, Nanik Mirna, B. Munni Ardhie, Agus Tjahjono, Pandu Sadewo, S. Wagiono, Bachtiar Zaineol, Ris Purwono, S. Prinka, Anyool Soebroto and Satyagraha.

5. Elly Kent, (2022). Artists and the people: ideologies of art in Indonesia. Singapore, NUS Press, p. 17 doi: 10.2307/j.ctv2wn4c9d . A digital copy of GSRB’s 1974 manifesto was provided to me by GSRB member FX Harsono in 2012, but a published version also appears in Miklouho-Maklai, 111–114.

6. Documenta15 also generated a prescient controversy around allegations of antisemitism levelled at ruangrupa and a range of exhibiting artists, especially Indonesian art collective Taring Padi. See Elly Kent, and Wulan Dirgantoro. "We need to talk! Art, offence and politics in Documenta 15." (2022). https://www.newmandala.org/we-need-to-talk-art-offence-and-politics-in-documenta-15/ for an extensive discussion of the incident.

7. Ellen Kent and Frans Prasetyo, ‘”SIASAT”–Artistic Tactics for Transgression on State Authority,’  Paririmbon Jatiwangi, Daun Salambar Foundation and Jatiwangi Art Factory (JAF), 2015, pp. 37-54, doi: 10.17613/M6HZ26

8. Indah Setiawati “Turning the stone-cold city into art hub.” In The Jakarta Post Sat, July 20, 2013,  https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/07/20/turning-stone-cold-city-art-hub.html

9. See ‘Whispers of Sisyphus’ on https://www.isaartanddesign.com/exhibitions/108-whispers-of-sisyphus-art-jakarta-2024/

10. Adi Kusuma, ‘Bisnis Seni Rupa sebagai Medium Karya Seni: Membongkar Praktik Ace House Collective,’ in Baca Arsip: Buletin IVAA Dwi Bulanan edisi Mei-Juni 2019. https://ivaa-online.org/baca-arsip-ivaa/bisnis-seni-rupa-sebagai-medium-karya-seni-membongkar-praktik-ace-house-collective/ 

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