Activities Highlight #1 Residency Period April-June 2023

For the three artists-in-residence, a residency program serves as a platform to explore the past, with Yogyakarta as the “site” of their interpretation. Artists will meet and interpret a location and the people who live there on a daily basis. Both foreign and local artists get the opportunity to investigate, question, create, and interpret various social phenomena and historical backgrounds.

Tracing history becomes an artistic practice that is not only political but also an attempt to uncover each artist’s identity that is currently disconnected due to the pressures of those in power in the past. Such tracing includes collecting oral narratives, vocabulary, and archival documents and photographs–a practice that is familiar to both Arif Furqan and Roberta Joy Rich. Furqan wants to find out how New Order-era monuments are interpreted by those now living around them. For Furqan, the “spirit” of the New Order has become more distant to the community and may have been replaced by a different spirit.

Roberta (Australia) and Samboleap (Netherlands) inherited the burden of history from their parents as second-generation immigrants who were born and raised far from their country of origin. Roberta seeks to trace the footsteps of the Dutch colonial period, which connected Cape Malay in South Africa with the Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia. Samboleap, on the other hand, is keen to find local art forms and Buddhist practices, as both were erased from Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge was in power.