Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

112 SESSION II
in 1965, and the day she first arrived in Yogyakarta a
year earlier.
Bamadhaj designed Enamlima in a way that maps out
the following itinerary: First, the viewer had to cross
official versions of history (a map of Yogyakarta made
out of books) and a reorganized public space (streets
named after the slain generals), then go through official
visual references to the past (photographs), before finally
viewing alternative historical memories of 1965 and its
aftermath (videos).
At the end of the itinerary are a suite of eight videos—
the artist’s first attempt at video art. Each video work
was encased in a compartment covered with an old
photograph from the period. Purchased from Yayasan
Idayu and the Indonesian Press and Photo Service in
Jakarta, these photos were meant to represent official
versions of what happened.
But before the viewer could access the photos or the
video works, they had to walk upon a sculptural installation
of books shaped like a map of Yogyakarta. This “map”
depicted the streets named after the eight generals
(official Suharto version pegs the number to six) killed
in September 30, 1965. The books, on the other hand
symbolically refer to how public thought is militarized
and how public spaces are organized around names that
serve as examples of Revolutionary Heroes—an
appropriation that borrows from the revolutionary
nostalgia of the 1940s and serves to reinforce the anticommunist
ideology.
Through this complicated map, Bamadhaj sought to
present—amidst systematic attempts and pervasive
sentiments of forgetting, and amidst competing modes
and versions of remembering—her highly abstracted
and symbolic version of history, one that is informed
by years of human rights advocacy and her belief that
this massive violation of human rights must not
be forgotten. Forcing one to forget one set of memories
and remember an official version is contradictory, she
says. And “when it is exercised at a scale of an entire
country, it becomes a spectacular phenomenon, worthy,
I think, of artistic inquiry.”
And by presenting the results of this inquiry in
multi-media format, she sought to generate “some kind
of public dialogue amongst the art community about
how propaganda, on the past or otherwise, affects our
perceptions of the present, as it is our perceptions of
the present that contribute primarily to our work as
artists.” Her aim was not to tabulate her “findings” nor
faithfully re-enact all the gory, realistic details of suffering,
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
trauma and shame. Instead, as we see in her videos,
she “attempted to represent suffocating stigmatization,
vengeance as a consequence of violence, subservience
as culture, paralyzing fear, guilt and indifference—the
range of emotional extremes I have encountered in my
inquiry into this period of history. But more importantly,
I attempted to show that these emotional extremes are
experienced now—as living historical memories of 1965
and its aftermath - hence the title ‘sixty five now’.”
In Rape for instance, one of her video works in Enamlima,
Bamadhaj shows a woman in red, retelling a story of
abuse. She is an ex-detainee, who narrates her experiences
in political detention. But rather than taking the
documentary format and instead of presenting a graphic
re-enactment, the woman’s gestures merely hint at how
physical and verbal blows have been inflicted on her body.
Shot in a corner of her house and at a steady in-yourface
angle, the woman’s face is deliberately concealed
and her voice and other ambient sounds muted.
Soundlessly, the video calls undivided attention to the
fiery-red body and its vigorous movements, punctuated
by what the artist describes as a “phallic” baton.
This woman’s story is among many—there were stories of
courage, determination and will to survive, and there
were those of defeat, fatalism and even denial. “I held
my breath as a woman who told me through her tears
that almost every woman in a particular prison in Central
Java where she was held had been raped by their jailers,
some in unspeakable ways.” There were others who
metaphorically “wanted to die”, burying and effectively
“killing” themselves by refusing to remember. “Other
ex-detainee women eerily denied this information (of
rape in a Central Java prison), as though they had yet to
admit it to themselves, after 37 years.” For it is indeed
unbearable to speak about rape— to speak it is to “publish
the shame of what was done to the sufferer”. Rape or
“sexualized torture” is never forgettable—“it is a radical loss
of self, a kind of murder, a reduction of one’s humanity,
from which…one never comes back. The trauma leaves
its mark as shame.” (Pollock, 2005)
The woman in Rape however, refuses to “die” and lose
her self and rather than come across as a victim, Bamadhaj
wanted her to take hold of her memories, as she wields
her baton to express her anger, not necessarily by re-telling
a story, but by offering that anger as a contact point
that will hopefully change the subjectivities of those for
whom this story is being offered and re-imagined.