Public conversation with Tisna Sanjaya and Dr Elly Kent

Art is of course more than just art. Kent calls these art practices an “engagement with principles of democracy and citizenship by exposing the absence of these principles in the lives of the rakyat.” Rakyat or ‘the people’ are not the country’s political and industrial elite.

Understanding of the Indonesian contribution to post-colonial democratic ideals has been rapidly growing. At Documenta Fifteen in Kassel (2022) under the artistic direction of ruangrupa— the Jakarta-based artist-led education collective introduced a curatorial system they called the lumbung (rice barn) model, which focuses on collective resource sharing, a system analogous to Tisna’s waterwheel curatorial system and many others in Indonesia. Here too Tisna made an individual performance as a member of Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF).

These collectivist art practices somewhat startled the first world.

For Tisna, the linking of performance, theatre and etching are a formwork for socially engaged practice. He returned from Masters study in Germany in the late 1990’s to lecture at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Indonesia’s key conceptual art school and complete his Doctorate at Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta (known as ISI).

During a time of crisis, Sanjaya’s response to the Covid pandemic was to trigger inspiration of art’s role in communities by giving out food packages in Bandung. In Australia many remote Indigenous art centres played the same critical role with artworkers delivering food and materials.