Sponsor: Harvard University Asia Center
Description:
Two talks on the topic of Indonesian cultural memory, media, and visual arts in the wake of 1965.
Wulan Dirangatoro
After 1965: Historical Violence and Strategies of Representation in Indonesian Visual Arts
The presentation will reflect on the issues surrounding the representation of historical violence in the practices of artists such as Tintin Wulia (b. 1971), Yaya Sung (b. 1982), Dadang Christanto (b. 1957) and Rangga Purbaya (b. 1976). The term ‘After 1965’ is used to describe the impact of historical violence on aesthetic practices of Indonesian contemporary artists. Scholars have noted that Indonesian visual artists drawn their inspiration from historical, cultural and sociopolitical changes, both visually and conceptually. However, little attention has been paid about the aesthetic impact of these changes on the art works.
Drawing from Astrid Erll’s notion of ‘transcultural memory’ (2011, 2019), the presentation will discuss how memory travels and its locatedness not only shaped and mediated memory but also produces dynamic tension that takes place in the interconnected processes of creation, transmission, and reception (Erll et al. 2019) through the artworks. The presentation will examine transcultural memory as it operates on the three levels of the narrated, narration, and reception process in the works of these Indonesian artists. The diasporic and transgenerational perspective of artists produce artworks that simultaneously functions epistemologically (as a means of comprehending) and therapeutically (as a means of coping) of the historical violence.
Grace Leksana
Sites, Narratives, Coexistence: Remembering the Anti-communist Violence in Indonesia Today
The anti-communist violence that occurred in 1965-66 in Indonesia has been one of the most controversial event in the country’s history. On one hand, the national historiography recorded the killings of seven high rank army officers on 1 September and accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as the perpetrator behind this movement. On the other, the extermination project against the left and the continuous persecutions against them remain largely excluded in the national narrative. While the death of the high rank army officers is continuously commemorated, the death of more than five hundred thousand to one million Indonesian leftists is mostly silenced. In this lecture, I will present the coexistence between these different narratives by examining various sites of violence in a particular rural district in East Java. Through exploration of these sites, we will see how different narratives are entangled in a certain site and how their meaning could transform over time. Furthermore, these sites are in a constant dialogical process with the people surrounding them. The sites become devices of negotiation in present society, rather than symbols of remembrance of the past.
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