Elephant in the Room (2018 – 2019): Jakarta History Museum, Jakarta 

The Jakarta History Museum has a more diverse audience than the National Museum of Indonesia, and its visitor numbers are far higher. The two iterations of Elephant in the Room took place at the Jakarta History Museum (Fig. 107) in 2018 and 2019 and extended the scope of A Tale of Cities: Narrative Archive of Memories at the National Gallery of Indonesia. Elephant in the Room, did not seek to communicate with art audiences but primarily aimed to communicate with non-art audiences in Jakarta: In that regard, Jakarta History Museum offered an optimal opportunity to explore how ordinary citizens of Jakarta and foreign tourists responded to the messages of contemporary art in places they did not expect to find it. 

In the first Elephant in the Room exhibition (2018), the works by participating artists shed new light on the hidden and forgotten stories in the history of Jakarta, and they were juxtaposed with artefacts from the museum’s collections. The second iteration of Elephant in the Room (2019) was the first time a chronological table of Jakarta’s history had been presented at the Jakarta History Museum. 

Whereas A Tale of Two Cities: Narrative Archive of Memories collected stories from the shared history of Korea and Indonesia on a broad historical level, Elephant in the Room offered a contemporary perspective through artistic practices that invited visitors to participate and to experience a paradoxical ‘difference’ created between the presentation of objective, universal facts, and subjective, selective memories. The exhibitions aimed to demonstrate that art is not only for society’s elite but can speak to everyone, and it emphasized the importance of Indonesian’s present and future rather than its past colonial history and that of the Dutch who ruled Indonesia. 

Sulki and Min’s Earth Now (2018) (Figs. 108, 109) consists of ten flags: these depict a cacophonous landscape of the earth’s languages. The white-noise-like image collapses the words in 145 different languages that mean ‘now’: from the Spanish ‘ahora’ to the Chinese ‘现在’, or from the Afrikaans ‘nou’ to the Zulu ‘manje’. Sulki and Min explained that, 

“’Now’—the word and the idea—is interesting as it suggests the speaker’s intimate relation to her or his time, while the meaning is often vague outside a specific context. We think it captures something about how we occupy our history, concretely and indeterminably.” 

Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina collaborated with Yos, a local artist who draws the portraits of travellers in a tourist spot in North Jakarta close to the museum. Together they devised a series of character cut-outs which visitors could inhabit by inserting their faces through the head holes (Figs. 110, 111). A team specializing in tours to Jakarta’s historical sites was also asked to undertake a special tour for the exhibition; they introduced the artworks in a relevant historical context and, at the same time, raised questions to encourage the historic consciousness of Indonesian visitors. 

Ahmett and Salina’s Beribu Budak (2018-ongoing) (Figs. 110-118) was based on their research in Japan in 2018, which focused on the historical relationship between Batavia and Dejima through the paintings of Kawahara Keiga (1786-1860) and the diaries of the Opperhoofden (Chiefs of the VOC factory at Dejima). They attempted to trace the existence of people from the Indonesian Archipelago, who were shipped by the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie/Dutch East India Company) as slaves to an artificial island in Nagasaki Bay, southern Japan, known as Dejima (Figs. 117, 118). It was the only place in Japan open to Western trade during the isolation period of more than two centuries (1633-1853). At that time, Batavia was the headquarters of the VOC and played an essential role in supporting the expansion of the Dutch in strategic areas throughout the Asian region. Walls surrounded Batavia and its population of 27,000, of which 16,000 were slaves (recorded census in 1673). The VOC built such walls to protect them from any outside attacks, wild animals, and an intrinsic fear of Javanese people. Such a fear of the Javanese originated from their adherence to Islam, although it was different to the Islamic faith of the Middle East due to its hybrid mix with local beliefs. However, the VOC operated cautiously before making any Javanese people slaves. The slaves that were sent to Dejima were mainly from the island of Bali and the eastern islands. Their roles were to prepare food, tend to livestock, provide entertainment and to care for their masters’ children. Kawahara Keiga’s paintings and the Opperhoofden diaries, suggest that the slaves’ existence was marginalised (although their numbers were huge) to the extent that they were often depicted in the paintings as mere exotic ornaments. Their reconstruction of these slaves as life-size standees for the Elephant in the Room exhibition aimed to cause visitors to reflect on modern Indonesia—as a nation that still sends labourers abroad, and where Indonesian migrant workers still find themselves marginalised. 

Song Sang Hee produced Geegers, You and I (2018) (Figs. 119-123), working with Indonesian artists’ collective Sunday Screen for this exhibition in Indonesia. The script for this work was adapted from Space Fantasia (vol. 3, chapter 16: Colony), written and illustrated by Yukinobu Hoshino. All the postcards that appear in the work were produced between 1907 and 1941. There are 22 postcards in total, including 15 from Indonesia, 5 from Korea, 1 from Japan, and 1 from the United States. The Indonesian postcards are marked in the Dutch language (Briefkaart it Nederlandsch-Indië) on the reverse. It can be assumed that the Indonesian postcards were made for European consumption by Dutch colonialists in Indonesia. The Korean postcards were produced by the Japanese during the Japanese colonial era. Foreigners who stayed in Korea during the Korean Empire era/Japanese colonial era, were mainly Japanese, and used such postcards to communicate with their families who remained in their home countries. The artist aimed to visit the places shown in the historical postcards and to take photographs from the same perspectives, although there are 90-100 years between the past and present images. For instance, some of the schools that appear in the contemporary images were once POW camps where Koreans would have been taken captive and drafted by force to Japan during the Second World War. The juxtapositions of contemporary images with historical postcards of people amplify the sense that those in the latter ‘were there at that time.’ The information about the prison camps and prisons of Java Island in Indonesia during the Second World War was taken from the ‘Indische Kamparchieven’ website. The soundtrack music is ‘Mysteries of The Macabre’ by György Ligeti. Peter Masseurs and Asko Ensemble played the trumpet performance. The opening music is ‘The Sound of Earth’, recorded on the Voyager Golden Record produced by Nasa. 

For Elephant in the Room (2018-2019), all participants researched Indonesia’s historical and social background. Most of the artists undertook fieldwork and their resulting artworks covered a range of relevant and intriguing historical topics. And docents would offer explanations of the work in conversation with interested public members, usually in response to their questions.

In preparation for the second iteration of Elephant in the Room (2019), I worked with two Indonesian historians, Bondan Kanumoyoso and Andi Achdian on a chronicle of Jakarta’s modern history since 1945 (Figs. 126, 127), with our research conducted in the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia (Figs. 124, 125, 126). I selected the archive photographs that illustrated aspects of life in the 1950s. The images of the children in the pictures indicate that Indonesian girls did not wear hijabs at that time. In contrast, currently, in several regions of Indonesia, even preschool girls wear hijabs.

I proposed this exhibition as the Jakarta History Museum still did not have information or collections about the history of ordinary people in Jakarta. The outcome was the first Indonesian-centric modern history exhibition held in the Museum, one that did not focus on colonial histories. The temporary exhibition of the chronicle of Jakarta’s modern history was juxtaposed with items from the museum’s permanent collection; it was an exhibition that allowed us to acknowledge some of the events that have influenced the ‘present’ of Indonesian people connected to the colonial period. The exhibition aimed to demonstrate that art no longer just addresses the wealthy middle-class but, rather, it is a medium that can speak to all people. Through this exhibition, I hoped that I and my collaborators could identify something essential that is missing or habitually overlooked. I was confident that this exhibition could function as a medium where art delivered stories that individuals otherwise could not or did not speak about. I hoped that the exhibition could empower people and become a turning point by helping them find practical and tangible ways of addressing current-day issues by gaining a better understanding of the past.