Caitlin Hughes

Thesis

Art and Indonesia after 1998: Narrations, Regenerations, Postnation

The subject of this thesis is Indonesian contemporary art after 1998. It is concerned with debates and
experiences that have shaped the development of distinctly postnational, decentred, and displacing
narratives for art in a new climate for art practice, and analyses the trajectories these ideas have
taken across the Reformasi (1998-2008) and post-Reformasi (2008-now) contexts.

Central to this trajectory is understanding the perspectives and experiences of younger artists across this period, as well as non-Java artists – many of whose works and ideas have yet to be collected in archives. Holding ‘art’ and ‘Indonesia’ together in a productive tension, the aim is to explore works in the interdisciplinary middle-space that escapes easy categorisation as seni rupa (fine arts) or even ‘Indonesian’ art. This thesis asks what forms and perspectives have emerged here, and why artists were drawn to experiment on/in these margins. In turn, it questions how these ideas and artworks may shape an expanded picture and narrative for post-1998 Indonesian history.

The thesis analyses selected events, exhibitions and artworks, as well as works from adjacent disciplines (in particular, film and literature), to contextualise the shifting paradigms by which Indonesian artists have sought to relate their artworks across artistic, geographical and philosophical-cultural boundaries. Taken together, a cross-disciplinary, narrative, and regenerative picture of post-1998 art from the
archipelago demonstrates the consistent interests from artists in finding ‘lines of flight’ or ‘ways out’ of a purely national-oriented frame.

From a decentralised ontology and philosophical standpoint, the critical narratives shaped for art practice since 1998 are neither national in character nor wholly ‘global’ in their view; rather, they can instead be understood as artists’ attempts at establishing a series of postnational relations between islands, regions and worlds.