13 - Perempuan mengkaji seni: Gender, activism and Indonesian visual arts

Summary

On a breezy Friday night on 12 August 2022, five women wearing all-white dresses walked into a gallery space. They sat on white chairs arranged in a clockwise direction; in the middle of the circle, a digital clock was set on a small stool. A small pile of fabric was positioned on the floor. Each performer then placed a small, portable sewing machine on their lap. For twenty minutes, the performers sewed small pieces of cloth from a small cardboard box next to their chairs and added their contributions to the existing pile in the centre of the circle.

The performance art was titled Rotary. It was performed by an allwomen art collective, Perempuan Pengkaji Seni, based in Surabaya. The venue where they performed the piece was Lawangwangi Creative Space, one of the premier contemporary art spaces in the city, located in the hilly northern part of Bandung. The event was the announcement evening of the seventh Bandung Contemporary Art Awards, a biennial contemporary art prize in Indonesia. Earlier in the evening, the jury comprising FX Harsono (visual artist), Aaron Seeto (director of Museum MACAN), Tom Tandio (founder of IndoArtNow Foundation), Evelyn Halim (CEO of Sarana Global Finance Indonesia) and Wiyu Wahono (entrepreneur) announced that Perempuan Pengkaji Seni had won the money prize of 100 million rupiah. In addition, two other artists, Patriot Mukmin and Victoria Koesasi, were the winners of the three-month art residency in France and travel prizes to Europe (Siswadi 2022; Surya 2022).

The description of the performance work by Perempuan Pengkaji Seni serves as a starting point to discuss a significant shift in the Indonesian art world in the past two decades, namely the production and reception of visual arts framed through the lens of gender activism. Since the fall of the authoritarian regime, Indonesia has achieved some noteworthy progress towards gender equality, such as ratifying all major international conventions that uphold principles of gender equality and empowerment, for example, the 2004 Law on the Elimination of Domestic Violence and the 2009 Law on the Protection of Women and Gender-Based Violence. However, gender inequality remains a systemic problem in the Indonesian art world. Koalisi Seni, a non-government organisation that focuses on arts and cultural policy advocacy in Indonesia, observed that women continue to be under-represented in leadership positions in the cultural sector and in collections and exhibitions in major institutions (Koalisi Seni 2021a).