Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Glossary and Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Defining Experiences
- 2 Firing the Canon: Indonesian Art Canons as Myth and Masculine Ideal
- 3 Haunting in the Archipelago: Emiria Sunassa and Mia Bustam
- 4 Female Desire and the Monstrous-Feminine in the Works of IGAK Murniasih
- 5 Searching for the Feminine: Motherhood and Maternal Subjectivity
- 6 Performing Feminism/s: Performance Art and Politics in the Works of Kelompok PEREK and Arahmaiani
- 7 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Glossary and Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Defining Experiences
- 2 Firing the Canon: Indonesian Art Canons as Myth and Masculine Ideal
- 3 Haunting in the Archipelago: Emiria Sunassa and Mia Bustam
- 4 Female Desire and the Monstrous-Feminine in the Works of IGAK Murniasih
- 5 Searching for the Feminine: Motherhood and Maternal Subjectivity
- 6 Performing Feminism/s: Performance Art and Politics in the Works of Kelompok PEREK and Arahmaiani
- 7 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Saya tahu siapa yang harus saya bela, karya-karya saya bicara untuk perempuan juga.
(I know whom I have to defend, my works speak for women as well, Dolorosa Sinaga, artist).
Aku percaya karya-karyaku nanti akan menjadi penting.
(I believe that my works will be important one day, Titarubi, artist).
Saya tidak dogmatis tentang feminisme.
(I am not dogmatic about feminism, Mimi Fadmi, performance artist).
In this book I have explored the relationship between feminism and visual art in Indonesia. Focusing on works by Indonesian women artists produced from the 1940s until the present day, the book provides a new understanding of the history of Indonesian modern and contemporary art from a feminist perspective.
My aims were to analyse the actual works of Indonesian women artists and to illuminate the socio-cultural and political contexts in which they worked, within a feminist framework. I set out to explore several key issues that arose from a 2007 curatorial project titled “Intimate Distance: Tracing Feminism in Indonesian Contemporary Art” in the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta. While the exhibition and the complementary curatorial essay focused on creating a thematic survey in the works of Indonesian women artists, they did not address the question of how feminist readings can provide new understandings of the history of contemporary Indonesian art. In addition, the 2007 event also fell somewhat short in its attempt to establish a new perspective for analysing the works of Indonesian women artists, a perspective that is fluid and context-dependent and rooted in feminist ideas. This book has attempted to address these shortcomings, thereby filling an important gap in the literature on Indonesian contemporary art.
The book is not an attempt to define what Indonesian feminist art is and/or who a feminist artist is. Despite frequent use in texts written by Indonesian scholars and non-scholars alike, the definition of the concept and even the term “feminism/s” still lacks consistency in Indonesian art discourse. Indonesian scholars and writers have often dismissed feminism as something that is purely a Western import and therefore not relevant to the Indonesian context.
Feminists came to be caricatured as man-hating lesbians who refused family and Eastern/Indonesian values.
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- Information
- Feminisms and Contemporary Art in IndonesiaDefining Experiences, pp. 199 - 208Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017