From silence to speech: witnessing and trauma of the anti-communist mass killings in Indonesian contemporary art

Abstract

Despite the positive reception around Indonesian modern and contemporary art, some key issues remain sensitive to the Indonesian public and art world. One of the most prominent concerns is the anti-communist mass killings of 1965–1966. In the absence of public discussion of the 1965–1966 events, contemporary art functions as an insightful prism for understanding the traumatic effects of the killings and reveals the highly nuanced and sometimes contradictory experiences generated by conflict and authoritarianism. This paper discusses the artworks of two Indonesian artists, Dadang Christanto and Tintin Wulia, to examine different trajectories of the representation of the 1965–1966 mass killings and the pluralities of trauma. By focusing on the intersection between witnessing and ethical spectatorship, the discussion explores how art practices introduce new ways of understanding and responding to historical trauma in Indonesia.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• contemporary art
• trauma
• mass killings
• 1965
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Wulan Dirgantoro is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests centre on gender and feminism, and trauma and memory in Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Her publications include Feminisms and Indonesian Contemporary Art: Defining Experiences and ‘Aesthetics of Silence: Exploring Trauma in Indonesian Painting 1970–1980’ in Ambitious Alignment: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art. She has also contributed to various art publications in Asia, Australia and the UK on Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Prior to her current role, she was a lecturer on the MA Asian Art Histories program at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore (2014–2016) and research fellow of the Kunstgeschichte und ästhetische Praktiken 2016/2017 program, at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin.

Notes

1 The Act of Killing (2012) could be the exception to this. The film’s focus on the perpetrators revealed multiple manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorders even by the perpetrators.

2 Despite the political content in many of the artworks, the reception of the Jakarta biennale was overshadowed by a heated polemic on postmodernism as framed by the curatorial concept. See Dim (1994) and Hujatnikajennong (2001).

3 See controversies around Andreas Iswinarto’s exhibition in 2017 in Permana (2017), Yogyakarta and Galam Zulkifli’s painting The Indonesian Ideals in Saroh (2016).

4 Christanto said that he later tried to search for the photographer, hoping to find proof of his father’s torture. But he could not find the photographer nor other stories regarding roving photographers during the chaotic period. He concluded that the story could well be apocryphal (personal communication, August 8, 2018).

5 Wulia (2008) speculated that her grandfather was taken away because of his active involvement in a local Chinese organisation (Baperki) that promoted the integration of ethnic Chinese into Indonesian society. Baperki which claimed 250,000 members, was loosely connected with other mass organisations affiliated with PKI, but largely stayed out of the wider political arena. See also Cribb and Coppel (2009).

6 See http://living1965.org/index.html. Since 2015, Wulia, Setiawan and their team, including Rangga Purbaya, regularly solicited contributions from other people in their network to share reflections on 1965–66 events, including the author who has done an earlier project on the subject matter. The group later transferred to an Instagram platform in 2018 and is currently on a hiatus.

7 For discussion of ‘fourth wall’ see Brown (2012).