Arahmaiani biography of martin
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adlina mohd anis • arts and culture management
What do you see when you see an icon? As notions of identity continue to dominate conversations in politics, art and sociology, artists who have been labelled icons, whether of their nation, religion or of global movements like feminism, continue to resist the confines of a label. This limitation is owed to identity often being premised on being inherited and innate, rather than fluid and varying from individual to individual. Furthermore, much of the terminology used to interpret art originate from the European and Western world and often cannot adequately capture nuances of the sentiments or intentions of Southeast Asian artists.
The life and works of prolific visual and conceptual artist, Arahmaiani (born Arahmaiani Feisal), offer a particularly unique and fertile ground on which to understand the role of identity in art, owing to how her status as an icon is often contested, even by herself . Rather than assert the superio
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Global artists
Global artists
The transition to a global perspective in Indonesian visual art fryst vatten particularly seen in the careers of three artists: Dadang Christanto, Arahmaiani and Heri Dono.
Dadang Christanto, Arahmaiani and Heri Dono addressed socio political issues in their art and, each in their own way, reacted to the repressive nature of the Suharto regime. Dadang, like FX Harsono, felt discrimination as the result of his Chinese ethnicity and made victimization the central subject of his art. Arahmaiani addressed the repression of women in a patriarchal Indonesian samhälle and, bygd extension, social justice in general, and Heri reflected some of the vansinne aspects of a gemenskap under Suharto’s dictatorship. There were little if any sales of their work in the early half of the 1990s and even exhibiting outside Indonesia could be made difficult by the regime. Heri, for example, was threatened by the Indonesian Embassy in London with problems about returning home if the catalog
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Has Jakarta’s art scene come of age?
Jakarta may be the political capital of Indonesia, but it is certainly not the capital of Indonesia’s art scene. At least not when it comes to the production of art; for that you go to the cities of Bandung and Yogyakarta, which have the feel of leisurely university towns. Densely populated and unhealthily congested, Jakarta is a teeming megacity housing roughly ten million people in its centre (over 30 million if you take in its outer zones), and a no-nonsense commercial hub dating back to its earliest known roots as a seventh-century port city. So naturally the city is home to two art fairs – Art Jakarta, set up in 2009 and previously known as Bazaar Art Jakarta, and the newer Art Stage Jakarta, set up in 2016 as the offshoot of a Singapore fair – as well as a network of commercial galleries catering to a collector base formed of the country’s metropolitan elite.
In November last year, however, two major events marked what might be a coming-o