Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning

“The Death of a Tiger and Other Empty Seats” by Timoteus Anggawan Kusno (2018). Photo courtesy of MMCA, Korea/ Moon June Hee.

The current pandemic had a dramatic impact on the arts and culture sector across the globe. Museums, cultural institutions and historic monuments had to be closed, exhibitions postponed or moved online, leading to communities deprived not only of culture, but also of significant revenues.

Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, the Artistic Directors of the 13th Gwangju Biennale, which is now planned to be held between February 26 and May 9, know all too well about the implications of COVID-19.

“Since we made the decision to postpone the Biennale, there have been new organisational challenges for us all to surmount. We are a team located in seven countries, and the pandemic has changed the way we work together,” says Natasha, who originally comes from Western India and now divides her time between Berlin and Colombo. “Shipping costs rose dramatically when the pandemic hit, and some new commissions, which were in the early stages of development, had to be paused.”

But Defne, who is also based in Berlin and hails from Istanbul, Turkey, says they have started to work on the Biennale a long time ago, with the intention to formulate bigger enquiries than the exhibition itself and to engage viewers beyond the consumption of physical works of art in an exhibition context.

“This meant that several hugely important aspects of our endeavour were already in existence before the postponement, including three incredibly valuable research trips by participating artists to Korea which took place in 2019 and early 2020, after which 40 new commissions went into production,” she explains.

The public online programme of talks and events actually began in October 2019 and continues until now as a thriving online hub of talks and events, whereas the bi-monthly online journal, “Minds Rising” acts as the “extended mind” of the Biennale.

“Both are crucial components of the Biennale, and were thought-through, pre-existing initiatives, rather than knee-jerk reactions to the pandemic,” Natasha says. “Similarly, some newly commissioned works were already conceived as exclusively for online audiences and are presented in the form of episodes and web series on social media channels and streamed on the Biennale’s website in the section ‘Live Organ.’”

They had already discussed the ideas of networked intelligence, public trauma endured through militarism and sexual violence, indigenous knowledge systems and communal healing before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, she adds, but they have now become more relevant than ever.

There are a number of Indonesian artists and activists involved in the Gwangju Biennale, most of whom Natasha connected to during a research trip in September 2019 to the archipelago, including Ester Haluk, a lecturer and activist involved in the Papuan Women Coalition movement.

“In her meaningful contribution to our online public programming initiative, Ester discusses the structural and cultural injustice and oppression faced by West Papuan women, starting with the missionary period, followed by the state oppression and militarism that furthered the extraction of natural resources, leading Papuans lose their right to their customary land,” Defne explains.

Ester herself didn’t hesitate to get involved – as West Papua is closed to international and even national journalists, it was a welcome opportunity for her to shed light on the current situation.

“It is a chance to share our narrative with other women in the world, tell them what West Papuan women experience on a daily basis and how we try to overcome these difficulties,” she says. “We experience cultural and structural violence and also face gender-based violence related to religious practices. West Papua is a very patriarchal society where women are considered second-class citizens. Moreover, West Papua has been in a prolonged political conflict since it was annexed by Indonesia through the Act of Free Choice in 1969 which we, the Papuans, refer to as ‘Act of No Choice.’”

For the Biennale’s feminism reader “Stronger than Bone”, an online publication, Natasha and Defne engaged Tamarra, an Indonesian artist who has been conducting artistic research on the history of waria (transgender women), and writer and researcher Brigitta Isabella.

“They share the nuanced ways in which trans-identified individuals can perform and mobilise their social roles and non-normative identities for modes of survival and acceptance in the Islamic context of Indonesia today.”

Tamarra is the last child of the last wife of her father – wife number 13. After leaving Islamic boarding school at the age of 17, Tamarra moved to Yogyakarta and had to survive by working as a busker and a sex worker, before eventually finding a job at a travel agency and starting her journey as an artist. When the pandemic reached Indonesia and turned everything upside down, Tamarra helped 150 of her transgender friends in Yogyakarta to continue paying rent at their respective boarding houses by initiating a funding campaign.

“I feel that my activism will last my whole lifetime because despite everything I have tried to achieve, wished and hoped for, things haven’t really changed yet,” Tamarra says.

During her research trip to Indonesia, Natasha also met visual artist Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, or Angga, who was then invited to the biennale with a newly commissioned artwork. Previously, Angga had already participated in exhibitions in South Korea before and spent three months as guest resident artist at the Asia Culture Centre at Gwangju in 2018.

“When I met Natasha, we had a prolific conversation on my long-term research, especially on my practice and experience in the space between art, ethnography and museology to unravel the hidden narratives that support the colonial mind,” Angga says, adding that they both believed it could open up new perspectives on investigating history.

Angga’s artistic contribution to the Gwangju Biennale is a metaphor for the idea of “The Unseen” (or Niskala).

“This new installation work will be responding to my current artistic research about the collective repressed experience during colonialism and dictatorship, and its relation to the belief in the ‘celestial world,’” Angga explains. “The main question is how the metaphysical world, or the world of the unseen, has been becoming a space for abstraction, encounter, and documentation of things that are invalidated by or cannot be recorded by the ruling regime and the ‘history.’”

Conceptually, he adds, “The Unseen” in this artwork refers to the cosmic space in which the supernatural resides, a place to accommodate all the invisible: “This very universe has been nature for any buried things. In this dark yet forlorn space is where the traumatic memories expelled by the authority remain. The memories, every so often, are covert beneath the sacred belief, along with the spirits of the tigers, mountains, seas, or ancestors.”

Visit https://13thgwangjubiennale.org/ for more information.

This article was first published in the January-February 2021 issue of NOW! Jakarta magazine.