In 2018, Meiliana, a Chinese Indonesian living in Sumatra, was jailed. Her crime? A complaint to a neighbour about the volume of the call to prayer at her local mosque.
Meiliana, who is Buddhist, was released last month on parole. Yet the fallout over the case remains. Not only did her objections lead to an anti-Chinese riot and the burning of several Buddhist temples in a country still riven by ethnic tensions; it reveals the damaging reach of Indonesia’s controversial blasphemy law.
Now the debate has made its way to Canberra – through art. In Wall of Tolerance – one of 50 plus works currently showing in Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) until October – a brick wall is peppered with gilded brass ears. At first the wall seems quiet. But lean in close and the ears emit the sounds of a call to prayer, recorded by artist Agus Suwage in his own neighbourhood.
“One of the things you first hear in Indonesia is that incredible noise – you’re relying on hearing as well as sight to navigate,” says the NGA’s Jaklyn Babington, who curated the exhibition. In Indonesia, the call to prayer, she adds, has become “literally a competition for airspace”.
Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia is an attempt to grow the NGA’s networks and relationships in the Asia Pacific region. (More than half of the works, which span three generations of artists, have been acquired for its own collection.) But if Contemporary Worlds has a remit beyond a play for soft power with Australia’s most important neighbour, it is to highlight the successes, tensions and fraught history of the world’s third-largest democracy, a vast teeming nation of 260 million people.
As Babington puts it, this is an exhibition about “sound and silence. What has been historically silenced is actually being vocalised now.”
That includes such state-organised violence as the Indonesian mass killings of the mid-1960s, which saw the army murder hundreds of thousands in an anti-communist purge, as well as the wholesale oppression in the same era of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority under the military dictator Suharto, who banned the public use of Mandarin and its teaching in schools.
Addressing such injustices of the past is FX Harsono, a sixth-generation descendant of Chinese immigrants. Best known for his performance work Writing in the Rain – in which the artist pens the characters of his Chinese name on a wall, only to see them washed away – Harsono has erected his work, Gazing on Collective Memory, at the NGA. A mass of electric candles hang from the ceiling, shining an otherworldly light onto wooden stands that hold photographs and schoolbooks. The installation is a powerful nod towards both the repression of a minority and the triumph of memory.
Then there’s Staging Collectivism by Jompet Kuswidananto, in which faceless, bodiless figures – suggested simply by veils and scattered shoes – are crammed together in the back of a beaten up truck. Below them dangle mechanical hands.
The hands clap, but without sound. Referring to mass mobilisation in Indonesia, as well as the trucks that transported the victims of Suharto’s anti-communist campaign to their deaths, the artwork is more about what is concealed than what is shown.
Today, other issues are as pressing. From religious tolerance – a matter, as the blasphemy law shows, that is far from a given in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation – to Indonesia’s battle with pollution and rapid, too fast urbanisation.
In her installation work, 1001st Island – The Most Sustainable Island in Archipelago, Jakarta-based Tita Salina has turned trash, literally, into art. Jakarta Bay is one of the most polluted waterways in the world and, with rising sea levels, the city is rapidly sinking. Both factors put pressure on local fisherman due to declining fish populations.
Addressing this, Salina has collected floating plastic and wrapped it in a fishing net to create her own “island”, which she then released into the bay – the 1,001st of Jakarta’s Thousand Islands. A net of plastic sits in the NGA, alongside a video where – defiant and alone, dressed all in black against a bleak industrial waterscape – Salina stands atop her manmade archipelago.
Indeed, in Contemporary Worlds women take centre stage. No artist embodies this more than Melati Suryodarmo’s durational performance Transaction of Hollows.
In a blinding white room, 15 viewers at a time are invited in to watch Suryodarmo fire a bamboo arrow from a traditional Javanese bow.
Over five hours, she fires 800 times – drawing and firing, drawing and firing. As the arrow hits the wall it produces a noise, akin to chanting. By the end she is bloodied and exhausted, as are the audience, who themselves become part of the meditation – an attempt to force us slow down in an increasingly frenetic, transactional world. As the audience negotiates the space, Suryodarmo moves around them like a slow dance. They will just have to hope that she fires straight.
• Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia is showing at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until 27 October 2019. Guardian Australia was a guest of the NGA
