Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

almost 40 years ago—September 30, 1965. According
to the official Suharto version, this coup (also known as
G30S or Gerakan 30 September) was perpetrated by the
Indonesian Communist Party or PKI (Partai Komunis
Indonesia), but aborted by Suharto, marking the beginning
of his 32-year New Order regime. 3
In 1989, when she was in her brother Kamal’s student flat
in Sydney, Bamadhaj came across her first of the many
versions of the G30S she was to encounter through the
years. Glued to the door of Kamal’s fridge was a leaflet
announcing a candlelight vigil for the ONE MILLION
(other versions estimate three million) PKI cadres killed
in the aftermath of the coup—a fact mentioned only
in passing in the Suharto version. But she was then a
still politically naïve second year art-school student,
and though she was baffled by the staggering number of
deaths, she left it there.
Bamadhaj completed her training in sculpture and
sociology at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand,
and worked in non-government organizations on HIV-
AIDS prevention and human rights advocacy. Aside
from lecturing and exhibiting in various countries, she
has also co-authored a work of non-fiction, Aksi Write
(1997) with her brother Kamal. It was published several
years after Kamal was shot dead by the Indonesian
military for participating in a pro-independence rally
in Dili, capital of the now independent East Timor.
Kamal died in 1991, three years after she saw the leaflet
about the millions who died in 1965 glued to the door
of her brother’s fridge.
After Kamal’s death, the G30S issues resurfaced during the
post-Suharto years, and having assumed that a dialogue
about who did what to whom was underway, Bamadhaj
focused on making art. When she was awarded the API
Fellowship, Indonesia became for her a research and
artistic destination, given perhaps the personal and
political memories she bears of that country.
When she started her research, she was puzzled: Why
the silence around 1965? “Why weren’t there more
Indonesian artists questioning Suharto’s version of that
event, despite the fact that they had been so critical of
him before he stepped down?”. (Bamadhaj, 2003) (All
quotes in this section are from this source. Page
numbers not available). And after months of interviews
with fellow artists, jailers and victims, digging through
archives and visiting unmarked graves, “It was no longer
possible to look at Indonesia in black and white” and grey
areas began to unfold.
There were victims for example, who asked her to “speak
ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 111
for them” and to represent them in favorable ways. They
wanted her and her art to be a vehicle for propaganda
despite being objects of propaganda themselves. They
wanted her and her art to say that it was Suharto who
masterminded the coup and there were others who
wanted to portray the gruesome things that happened
to them—“clearly so as not to be buried under artistic
abstraction.”
Victims also had selective memories: “My question about
how the PKI enforced the land distribution policies of
the early sixties were met with vague replies and distant
looks; though they remembered how much food they
were allowed in detention right down to the last grain
of corn.”
She also met with executioners who showed her unmarked
graves in East Java, “as though a means of exorcising
past demons.” There were also victims who kept vast
records about such sites to themselves. Going through
newspaper articles, she read conflicting signals and
sentiments about reconciliation on one hand, and
about the fear— largely from Muslim groups—of the
re-emergence of communism, on the other.
In other words, Bamadhaj has come to realize that
the slaughter of millions of communists cannot be
mapped out in simplistic dichotomies: the oppressed
(the masses) against the oppressors (the state), the
state (through its soldiers) versus communists (since
the killings were also done my local communities),
victims and victimizers. And rather than setting off
the competing versions of history against one another,
Bamadhaj realized that as an artist, she must seek to
present the complexity of the web of feelings, sentiments,
versions, and perspectives about one of the most violent
and still-unresolved events in Indonesian contemporary
history.
The result of her explorations took the form of a
site-specific multimedia installation called Enamlima
Sekarang (65 Now). Installed at Yogyakarta Bendeng
Vredeburg Museum, previously an army barracks
where many of the Indonesian Communist Party and
affiliated detainees were held for years after 1965.
However, tellingly indicative of how historical memory
can be expunged from official public memory, the
museum’s permanent chronological exhibition “neatly
stops at the 1940s and starts again at the 1970s, as
though the 1960s never existed.”. (Bamadhaj, 2003)
It is for this reason that the artist considered it
an appropriate site for her exhibition. Bamadhaj also
timed the opening of the exhibition on September
30, 2003, marking the date the generals were killed
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows