Resistance, Solidarity, and Visual Culture: Creating Social Change and Building Peace in Post-Conflict Indonesia

In Indonesia, victims and survivors of the 1965 mass killings, many women, and leftist artists have experienced discrimination, social and economic insecurity, and fear from social and direct violence. Consequently, socially-engaged arts communities in Yogyakarta, commonly known as Jogja, have organized for decades to resist against the dominant socio-political narratives that often disempower these marginalized populations and makes them the targets of violence. Using a social movement frame, this ethnographic research investigates repertoires of contention within artist and activist communities and seeks to reveal how the arts and visual culture function during social movements in authoritarian contexts and how communities make meaning with them in their day-to-day lives. While most of this research was conducted in Indonesia, as well as virtually, a portion of it was also conducted in Kassel, Germany where Indonesian artists and activists gathered to continue their work at Documenta 15, modeling their repertoires of decolonization and local knowledge production in the Global South.

Author

• Clay-Robison, Shelly

Identifier

hdl:1920/14551

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/14551