Report: Curatorial Intensive in Indonesia 2024

My exhibition proposal was halfway complete when I participated in the 2024 Curatorial Intensive in February–March. It was due in two and a half months. While those of us at the Komunitas Salihara—a private art center in Jakarta which comprises contemporary performing arts, literature and visual arts curatorial, and was founded in 2008—had decided on my project’s curatorial framework and its design was all set, the Intensive personally shifted my understanding of and relationship to the project quite fundamentally: How can we better communicate our project to our audience? ​

Within nine intensive days, the participants and ICI faculty members shared and learned the emotional, conceptual, and practical aspects of curating through mentoring, presentations, group discussions, and peer-to-peer learning. It was also the first time that the Intensive was held in two places, or should I say, chapters: Yogyakarta and Bali, two culturally rich yet very different regions for art in Indonesia. Yogyakarta is the home for spaces and practitioners who are deeply rooted in collectivism. Here, the Intensive program was mostly based in the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA). We also visited collective spaces including KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, Bakudapan, and Sekolah Pagesangan. Instead of seeing “art”, we saw practices and methodologies. KUNCI, for example, is a collective focusing on collectivism and pedagogy through research, library, press and publishing, and “school” organizing. The latter project is called The School of Improper Education, which explores alternative study methods through equal sharing instead of one-way, hierarchical teacher-student relations. 

An afternoon at KUNCI where all the participants participated in one of KUNCI’s initiative The School of Improper Education. Photo: Ibrahim Soetomo, 2024.

The Yogyakarta chapter, for me, was also our chance to study through observing and witnessing each other’s curating practice. While in Bali, we had fewer visits and concentrated our workshop in Yayasan Bali Purnati, a performing arts producer and space. This chapter was the time for more foundational reflections, leading to group-based project presentations on the last day. Over the nine days, we all observed an increasing confidence from each participant in presenting and planning projects. The whole chapter led to a patient, cyclical process of learning and unlearning. 

My project focused on six relief sculptures made by Indonesian modern artist groups in the 1950s–1960s in Java and Bali. Beginning in 2022, we at the Center shifted our visual art curatorial approach to be more historical, archive-based, and cross-disciplinary to balance our contemporary art exhibitions. We believe it is important to root ourselves in the history of intellectualism and nation-building, which is now often overlooked in current society. My project, titled Relief Era Bung Karno (Reliefs in Bung Karno’s Era; “Bung Karno” refers to Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno), is the fifth project in this ambitious trajectory. Positioning the relief art at the center, we delved into the dynamics of patronage, commissions, and monumentalism in public art, as well as nationalism. We conducted field research on actual relief sites, then processed it into a documentative exhibition format. For a while, I focused more on the relief medium itself. But after a session with faculty member and mentor Zoe Butt, I started to treat the relief artists (albeit all long deceased) as active agents, as storytellers, and as those who make legacies from which we can reap and pass knowledge. And that’s exactly one of the things I have learned: curating is storytelling. So, what kind of story would we like to convey? 

A morning session with one of the faculty members, Zoe Butt, at Bali Purnati. Photo: Ibrahim Soetomo, 2024.

A follow-up session with faculty member and mentor Lê Thuận Uyên also let me ponder on curating as practice. Can we claim our works as “practice”? What is our relationship with unresolved history and legacy? Do we have “mentor” figures? I flashed back to my first project since the curatorial shift at Salihara, which is still relatively recent, and started to trace why I am personally willing to do this work in the first place, especially within an institutional context. 

Curating is also storytelling down to the practical levels of project-making. During his session,  Renaud Proch gave us insights and tactics on budgeting, logistics, proposals, and funding. The way I observe it, once we know what kind of story we would like to narrate, we can also break down its budget and logistical plan, not as an assurance or guarantee, but more as a guide to help us anticipate what’s beyond our reach. But of course, curating is not always about “money” or “logistics”; it is also about building relationships. It is not all about “networking” or “contracts,” but also establishing friendships and trust. Curating is caring.

Curating is care. Faculty member Khanyisile Mbongwa, through her experience as Chief Curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale 2020 and Curator for the 25th Liverpool Biennial, shared with us the meaning of care especially in dealing with the history of violence, racism, and generational trauma. How does curating care and cure? How can we foster stronger, resilient communities? Through this vulnerable aspect of curating, one can begin to understand where one comes from. Here, again, individual and collective care is practical in seeking more meaningful ways to work and connect, especially in an overly institutionalized, bureaucratized art ecosystem, as we have learned from the collectives we visited in Yogyakarta.

The Intensive paved the way for us to reflect on why we curate. As I am writing this, the project I proposed has already been completed. Although the time between the Intensive and my project was so close that I could not make many technical changes, I still came to see it differently. I have never been more present with archives and artists’ legacies or with the friends and broader audiences who came to my show, without having to be overly quantitative in evaluating my project. I am in search of meaning. As I am writing this, I am thinking of our faculties, facilitators, and fellow participants to whom I am grateful and greatly owe my feelings.