JAKARTA JAKARTA

Arahmaiani – assembled in front of two light boxes: While Arahmaiani’s early installations “The Past has not Passed (Masa Lalu one an Indonesian flag upon which the demanded, importantly and often con- Belumlah Berlalu)” words “FOR SALE” are written, the troversially, that their viewer reject Museum MACAN other a halal sign. In the original accom- patriarchal conservatisms, newer 17.11.2018 – 10.03.2019 panying performance, the artist, sport- works see the artist embrace the role ing a Balinese dance costume with sun- of facilitator, and ebb towards commu- While a student in , Indone- glasses and a plastic lightsabre, argued nity as an emancipatory framework for sia, in the early 1980s, Arahmaiani con- that tradition had been commodified artmaking. For example, during Flag ducted a series of germinative, social- and resignified as entertainment. Project (2006–10), after emblazoning ly-conscious street actions with the Also on view was Do Not Prevent a flag with the Bahasa Indonesian performance group Sumber Waras. In the Fertility of the Mind (1997/2014/2018), word akal (“mind”) in Jawi text, Arah- 1983, after publicly criticising Presi- an installation conceptualised while maiani led a series of discussions in dent Suharto’s militaristic New Order Arahmaiani lived in Thailand after her Asia and Europe wherein she attempted regime, she was arrested. Freed one studies. The piece features a wall to identify core concepts upon which month later only after signing a form papered with disposable menstrual collectivity is founded. The results, that declared she was mentally dis- pads, in front of which an Erlenmeyer ranging from abstract ideas like “love”, turbed, and banned from exhibiting, flask containing blood-like liquid sits “resistance”, and “happiness” to fizzy she decided to leave her country and upon a veiled stool. Two photographic phrases like the Javanese expression continue her education in portraits, each depicting Arahmaiani ojo dumeh (“don’t be cocky”), are ren- and the . dressed as a nurse holding scissors and dered in different languages and col- Courtesy of Museum MACAN. Collection of Art Museum Embracing her status as a ours on flags that are carried in “global nomad”, Arahmaiani, who parades and displayed in public now resides in , Indo- spaces like museums. At MACAN, nesia, was among a wave of South- twenty-nine of these imperatives east Asian artists who gained the rippled from the ceiling near the freedom to condemn the repres- exhibition’s entrance. Arahmaiani, Do not Prevent the Fertility of the Mind, 1997–2014 sive policies of their home coun- Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, Feminine napkins, fluorescent lights, wooden stool, glass vial, blood, photograph tries – as well as the imperialistic often translated as “unity in diver- Installation view, Museum MACAN nature of capitalism as it destabi- sity”, is ’s official motto,

lised and exploited the Global and derives from the four- © Arahmaiani. Courtesy of Museum MACAN South – in the international art cir- teenth-century Old Javanese poem cuit of the 90s. Nation for Sale (1996), “Kakawin Sutasoma”. Enacting this an installation and performance which Arahmaiani principle, Flag Project mines a long- debuted at the Second Asia-Pacific Nation for Sale,1996 standing artistic conviction in the Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, railed Wood, lamp, photograph, medicine, power of heterogeneity and empathy in against the cheapening of Indonesia’s plastic toys, variable dimension the face of insularism and intolerance, cultural identity within the world mar- Exhibition view, Museum MACAN suggesting, quite magically, that there ketplace. Courted by Suharto’s belliger- are lessons we have yet to learn, but are ent anti- communism, western interven- an oversized intrauterine contraceptive yet to forget. The survey, with equal tionism stimulated economic device, symbolise the artist’s desire for dynamism, historicised Arahmaiani’s development during the Cold War, and women to be independent. The installa- polemical contributions to Indonesian after the fall of the Berlin Wall liberali- tion references Indonesia’s “two is contemporary art, while emphasising © Arahmaiani. Courtesy of Museum MACAN sation incentivised new waves of foreign enough” birth control policies and cri- the artist’s refusal to understand his- investors. Farmlands were thus sup- tiques the governance of reproduction. tory as static. Its title acknowledges that planted by factories while tourism oblit- Though often framed as an empowering museums bring art into the present, erated community values. Included narrative of modernisation, the artist not viewers into the past, but also amongst over seventy other works in has likened this anti-natalism to a pro- infers that despite the reformasi this survey, Nation for Sale features ject of “colonis(ation) by the state”. Rad- demonstrations of 1998, which saw more than twenty-five plinths display- ically, the work centres feminist agency Suharto’s dictatorship fail, much has Arahmaiani, Burning Country, 1999–2018 ing soldier figurines, pill jars, and toy in the Indonesian peoples’ ongoing fight yet to change. Wood, matchstick, fabric, 120 x 240 x 250 cm guns – cutesified icons of dependency for freedom in the postcolonial context. Harry Burke Installation view, Museum MACAN 190 VIEWS VIEWS 191