Grace Samboh, one of the curators of the 2021 Jakarta Biennale, narrates a trip down into a grey, humid, musty and noisy underground space, its walls decorated with waste and coolant pipes: “Imagine how hot it is! Imagine watching an hour-long video piece in there. Or multiple!” The subterranean room she describes is the underground parking garage of Taman Ismail Marzuki in Central Jakarta, the venue for the Biennale’s 2013 edition. “Of course, the coordinators installed air conditioning in the room for the visitor’s convenience. But this underground space was not designed for humans to spend extended periods of time in,” she writes in the publication for this year’s Biennale. That stifling garage is the point of departure from which she explores the changes the exhibition has undergone in the last decade, and speculates as to how it might change in the coming one.
Samboh is a member of the all-female curatorial team for the 2021 Biennale, themed Esok – Indonesian for “Tomorrow”, a historically formalist institution established as the Pameran Besar Seni Lukis Indonesia (The Grand Indonesian Painting Exhibition) in 1968 before adopting the Biennale title in 1974. The Biennale only dropped the word “painting” from its name in 1993, finally allowing in photography, video and performance art. Since the Biennale’s internationalisation in 2009, the organisers have consciously held the exhibitions outside of typical spaces, in order to create a sense of distance from the Western ideology of a pristine gallery that insulates art from society. Samboh’s reflection highlights a shift that has taken hold in the past decade – from strictly representational work to more expansive exhibitions open to archival documentation and issue-focused intervention, or what she calls “artifacts of ideas”.
Che Onejoon, International Friendship (2013). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Samboh, along with Enin Supriyanto and Akmalia Rizkita, previously ran the Rubanah Underground Hub, an independent art space in the basement of an office building in bustling Central Jakarta that temporarily closed during the pandemic. It comes as no surprise that her writing now places a newfound awareness of the atmospheric and vaporous at the fore. Though air circulation is a key consideration in most lineages of architecture, the last two years have brought an intensified interest in air purification, oxygen levels, particulates and their measurement to the art world, too. How do the politics of air, of its circulation and purification – despite its fundamental invisibility – inform our experience of viewing art, and the visual culture of our lives more generally?
It’s difficult to talk concretely about air; in a way, it is concrete’s opposite. On my first flight since the pandemic began, the captain’s typical announcement played over the raspy loudspeakers. Only this time, he concluded with a comforting statement: the plane had been fitted, he assured us, with a high-efficiency HEPA purifying system that obliterates contaminants and viruses. I bought the cheapest ticket I could find; I’m sure that, despite his reassurance, the airline didn’t refit their entire fleet. You need a certain level of faith to talk about air, so you’re never too far away from getting swindled. This became obvious in Indonesia when personal air purifying necklaces (also known as tiny fans with straps) were in vogue earlier this year. Many Indonesian ministers wore them in public appearances; the models they sported cost about half of the minimum monthly salary in Jakarta, and their effectiveness is dubious. These systems become props in the puppet-show of public health protocols – a mandatory performance of the invisible.
Circulation and purity are proxies for power, running parallel to the commodification of something as ethereal as the air we breathe.
Having the visual as our default mode of experience has rendered us unable to ground the concepts that we cannot see. For instance, so little of an art exhibition’s design is approached in relation to the air that circulates through the space. Though we can appreciate a gallery’s gestalt, a deconstruction of the scene brings up only the usual suspects: how the walls feel when we lean against them, the sound of the old projector hacking away, how the darkness of a cinema envelops our skin between scene transitions. When was the last time we thought about a gallery’s smell? Museums and biennales promise a stable and sanitised experience of viewing art, away from the stench of turpentine rags and sawdust particulates. An artist’s inclusion in these institutions of permanence consecrates them, even as financial compensation often remains scant. They become entitled to a form of purity-capital: I no longer have to hang my own frames! I can finally leave my collective! The exhibition space will be air conditioned!
Circulation and purity are proxies for power, running parallel to the commodification of something as ethereal as the air we breathe. In September, Piotr Jakubowski, the co-founder of air sensor manufacturer Nafas Indonesia, tweeted that, to his surprise, the air in the Indonesian city of Bandung contained higher levels of toxic particulate matter than the air in the capital city of Jakarta. He used this as a call-to-action for residents to voluntarily install air sensors in their homes, appealing to the idea that clean air is a human right. Any critic of the Internet of Things will immediately see red flags – the familiar whiff of quantification as a precursor to the extraction of citizens’ free labour, offered by way of their data, building towards the eventual privatization of a basic natural resource. The invocation of human rights by a corporation shifts the responsibility of providing a public good from the state to the individual. Nafas itself advises users that the “most important thing” to do to protect ourselves is by avoiding exposure to pollution and to keep the air clean in places that we spend the most time in, upholding the fantasy that it’s under our individual control.
The Museum of National Awakening during the installation of the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Photo: Alif Ibrahim
I visited my mum in Bandung a few weeks after that tweet came out. It had rained around noon, so the air was cool and sweet when evening came. At a friend’s recommendation, I paid a visit to Indeks, one of Bandung’s many grassroots arts research initiatives and exhibition spaces, located in the city’s red-light district. In the absence of an established ecosystem of art criticism (and the tendency for better-funded initiatives to turn into Yet Another Old Boys’ Club), DIY spaces and collectives are the primary ways for new and radical ideas to emerge here, though many involved lament their mercurial existence. Can independent art spaces and collectives in Indonesia achieve sustainability, or is this search a fool’s errand? Young artists coalesce in hopes of forming stable oxygen molecules, renting out houses as the collective’s headquarters. In the end, however, they more often resemble volatile esters: they leave a memorable scent, but dissipate as quickly as they appear.
I imagined Indeks to be a sleek white cube. To my surprise, I arrived to find a neighbourhood home in an alley, its front door and louvered windows left open. The entrance led directly to a long living room with a kitchen at its end, leading to another door at the back of the house. Its layout maximises natural airflow, a home-turned-exhibition-space opposite to both the hostile enclosure of an underground car park and the sterility of a commercial gallery. I sat with the two co-founders that were present, Dian and Rizki, who offered tea and cigarettes, as we chatted about everything from our boredom of NFTs to the curious fact that there were countless artworks about land and water extraction, but notably few about air.
Erika Tan with Cynthia Arnella, Althea Sri Bestari, Nudiandra Sarasvati, Florentina Windy & Yola Yulfiant, AMOK:KOMA (2021). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
They told me about the main venue for the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. What is now the Museum of National Awakening used to be the School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen (STOVIA) – the medical school for natives during the colonial era, which tied them to civil duty in service of the colonial government for ten years after graduation. The school was a complex site of stratification, indoctrinating upper-class natives through a European education. The classrooms and dormitories were built with small windows to block out noise from the streets, though some walls have now been broken down with open-air dioramas for visitors to meander through. Along the corridors, air vents are cut out of the centre of the ceiling.
We pondered, from our vantage point in Bandung, what it’d be like to experience the Biennale in its anomalously airy setting. Will the surroundings make it possible to appreciate the time-based medium in its full duration, unbothered by any suffocating atmosphere? Before I left, they reminded me to take my jacket. To their surprise, I told them I didn’t bring one.
Perhaps this year is pivotal for contemporary art in Indonesia. The Biennale’s artistic director, Dolorosa Sinaga, promises works that engage with politics beyond artistic expression, taking an approach of “curatorial activism”. Large contemporary art exhibitions here have garnered a reputation with netizens for being selfie traps, with masses obscuring the works on view as visitors line up for a picture (though this is hardly a problem that’s unique to Indonesia). Any attempt to regulate an exhibition’s air circulation, to implement public health protocol, immediately becomes irrelevant without a commitment to curating in ways that meaningfully account for the politics of the unseen. Samboh, in her essay, challenges Indonesian exhibition-goers to appreciate the art beyond aesthetics – to contemplate the invisible, like trying to scrutinize the politics of air.
Celia Irina González Álvarez and Yunior Aguiar Perdomo, Wet Season – Dry Season (2021). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Anna Daučíková and Tamarra, Talking to You (Online Performance) (2021). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Kenji Makizono, The Use of Energy (2018-2019). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Cecil Mariani and Anggraeni Widhiasih, Paranormal Baru: PENAMPAKAN (New Paranormal: APPARITION) (2021). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Song Ta, March of the Volunteers Songta Remix (2019). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Anusapati, EDUscape (2021). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Sleeping Deep Beauty (2021). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
Ary "Jimged" Sendy, Rasa Koto Moruk (2021). Installation view from the 2021 Jakarta Biennale. Courtesy: Jakarta Biennale
ALIF IBRAHIM is a writer and artist from Indonesia.
Jakarta Biennale 2021: ESOK
21 Nov 2021 – 21 Jan 2022
jakartabiennale.id