| 1. |
- Tetzlaff, Andrew, et al.
(författare)
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Tintin Wulia: Secrets
- 2023
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Ingår i: Melbourne, RMIT Gallery, 5 Dec 2023 - 27 Jan 2024.
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Tintin Wulia is an Indonesian Australian artist whose work reflects on globalisation and geopolitics and uses personal stories to unpick and lay them bare. For over 20 years she has researched the histories that have been told by the world’s dominant narrators, scrutinising their blindspots and systemic inequities and retelling them from nonconforming perspectives. Wulia’s recounting brings the past powerfully into the present and centres it on the voices of the periphery. Her works decode, reinterpret and represent history, orienting us to the current global situation in an effort to help collectively navigate towards a more socially just future.
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| 2. |
- Wulia, Tintin, 1972
(författare)
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Absence in Substantia: Frequency
- 2023
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Ingår i: Jakarta, Baik Art, 10 Jan - 24 Feb 2024.
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Absence in Substantia developed through analyses of data within what I came to call the Protocols of Killings archive. This archive, declassified in 2018, contains the once-classified cables that passed through the US Embassy in Jakarta spanning the years 1964-1968. It’s a wide-ranging record of communications during the critical period surrounding the 1965-66 Indonesian mass killings. When I started analysing the archive, I found 798 documents titled “Withdrawal Notice.” These are placeholders of documents that are considered still sensitive, and so they were retracted during the official evaluation that precedes declassification. So they’re sort of the secrets that are made even more secrets, even more restricted. This is where I extend on Walters’ logic: instead of seeing the closure as a problem, I focus on this disclosure-generated closure as potential. I also bring in my personal experiences of liminal death, and political scientist Oliver Kearns’s work on the absence left by drone strikes. Kearns argues that “A political response to covert strikes must go beyond 'filling in' absences and address how absence gains meaning in implicit ways.” From these withdrawal notices, I extracted dates referring to the original documents, to output frequency and density graphs of these retractions over time. The resulting bird's eye views show a pattern that peaks around the first date of the killings, 1 October 1965, which you can see as the pinkish-red thread cutting vertically on this work. Here I co-opt the act of closure into disclosure. I know this cooptation quite well. My grandfather’s liminal death left an unfilled lacuna, a particular hole right in the heart of my family, so to say. But we knew that there is no point filling this hole with anything else, because without this hole in its heart, my family’s heart is never whole. In other words, this wholeness that fully considers the hole is exactly why absence can be of substance. I think of this as a method of resistance—this Absence in Substantia. Absence in Substantia: Frequency, is showing the frequency graph on one of its two sides. Another work in the pair, showing the density graph, is being displayed in my other solo exhibition at RMIT Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The other side of these works suggests the magnitude of the documents retracted from the archive, like an eruption of secrets from a document shredder, like the remains of something that’s destroyed with a pronounced presence.
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| 3. |
- Wulia, Tintin, 1972
(författare)
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Context—after Kawara's Title, 1965
- 2024
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Ingår i: Jakarta, Baik Art, 10 Jan - 24 Feb 2024.
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Context - after Kawara's Title, 1965 is the second in a series where I develop on one of On Kawara's earliest surviving conceptual works, Title (1965), which decisively marked his entrance to conceptual art, leaving his figurative period behind. Kawara's earlier works depict gory scenes profoundly affected by the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like Kawara, I am deeply – although distantly – affected by US violence. Contrary to the sudden impactful bombings in Kawara’s case, the violence I experienced was slow, far-reaching, and long-lasting, crossing generations since 1965. This is why my first experience of Title (On Kawara, 1965) was so unsettling: Kawara must have known, I thought, that 1965 was not "ONE THING" (Wulia 2019, p.10). In Subtext - after Kawara's Title, 1965 (2019), the first work of this series, I exploded the three canvases of Title into 65 canvases of various sizes through rigorous research into the techniques and material that Kawara applied into this work as part of the BAIK ART Residency at Davidson College and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington DC. I also investigated the subdued themes in Kawara's Title, including a text he arguably self-censored, "RED CHINA" (Woo, 2010). Context results from a further investigation in my Swedish Research Council-funded research project, Protocols of Killings: 1965, distance, and the ethics of future warfare (2021-23), bringing in the context of the 30,000-page declassified archives of Jakarta US Embassy, 1964-68, surrounding the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. In Context - after Kawara's Title, 1965, I expand on my recent finding, namely the pattern of Withdrawal Notices I found across these 30,000-page archives. My analysis on the withdrawal of these 798 documents from the declassified archives shows the highest density around 1 October 1965, the date of the first killings that became the trigger event. This suggests that these withdrawn documents are the crème-de-la-crème of US's secrets surrounding the Indonesian 1965-66 mass killings. Context - after Kawara's Title, 1965 is an installation of 65 paintings of dates picked by diverse individuals, chosen from a list of dates corresponding to the withdrawn documents, hence linking two events: a personal memory, and a reality withheld for the sake of state-sanctioned history.
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| 4. |
- Wulia, Tintin, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Tintin Wulia: Disclosures
- 2024
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Ingår i: Jakarta, Baik Art, 10 Jan - 24 Feb 2024.
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- “Tintin’s recent projects offers essential context, illuminating the interconnectedness between national happenings and the influence and complicity of external forces. They reveal how these forces have molded Indonesia’s modern history’s socio-political contours. In this way, her work establishes a dialogue between the personal and political, between hidden histories and communal memory, and between the banality of everyday life and the extraordinary events that shape it. This preoccupation can be seen across all of the works within this exhibition.” (Aaron Seeto, December 2023) BAIK ART Jakarta is pleased to present Tintin Wulia: Disclosures. Tintin Wulia is an Indonesian Australian artist whose work reflects on globalisation and geopolitics and uses personal stories to unpick and lay them bare. For over 20 years she has researched the histories that have been told by the world’s dominant narrators, scrutinising their blind spots and systemic inequities and retelling them from nonconforming perspectives. Tintin’s recounting brings the past powerfully into the present and centres it on the voices of the periphery. Her works decode, reinterpret and represent history, orienting us to the current global situation in an effort to help collectively navigate towards a more socially just future. Tintin Wulia: Disclosures is presented in parallel with Tintin Wulia: Secrets at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne. It is prepared in conjunction with Tintin’s artistic research project at the University of Gothenburg entitled Protocols of Killings: 1965, distance, and the ethics of future warfare, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2020-02828), and is co-supported by various institutions and collaborators.
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| 5. |
- Wulia, Tintin, 1972
(författare)
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Memory is Frail (and Truth Brittle) – performance lecture
- 2024
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Ingår i: Jakarta, MACAN Museum, 13 Jan 2024.
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This performance lecture is based on an eponymous installation of 115 charcoal and graphite drawings the artist made in 2019, which was based on a text published in 2018. It questions the nature of reality and the building block of human knowledge, which is perceived mainly through humankind’s limited senses, the main part of which is the eye. At an allegorical level, it interrogates how our understanding of the world is largely constructed visually and recorded through memory, and how these are also prone to manipulation, for example in state propaganda and isolated versions of state-sanctioned history. --- Art does not merely articulate an artist’s personal expression but is often inseparable from a larger historical, political, and geographical context. To kick off the 2024 Museum MACAN public programs, artist/researcher Tintin Wulia presents a performance lecture and discussion session, Memory is Frail (and Truth Brittle). Exhibited as 115 illustrations drawn with charcoal and graphite, Memory is Frail (and Truth Brittle) presents a connection between major world events scattered across different times and places, and how these events are recollected by humans. As the subject navigates through ideas surrounding reality, frailty of memory, and human geography and history, Wulia interrogates what we believe to be reality is constructed largely from our sensory perception, state-sanctioned histories, and fragile memories of humans.
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| 6. |
- Wulia, Tintin, 1972
(författare)
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Memory is Frail (and Truth Falters)
- 2023
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Ingår i: Melbourne, RMIT Gallery, 5 Dec 2023 - 27 Jan 2024.
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 7. |
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