Under an August mid-morning sun, our van flew down the expressway leading away from the Denpasar International Airport. As I looked out the window, mangrove forests and shimmering ocean eventually morphed into a tight maze of shops, cafes, art galleries, and side streets.
I was here in Bali — for the very first time — for Indonesia Bertutur, a multidisciplinary arts festival organised by Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, now in its second edition.
Helmed by famed performance artist Melati Suryodarmo as Artistic Director and Taba Sanchabakhtiar as Festival Director, the 12-day festival would take place across some of the island’s top museums and galleries, with an impressive calendar of art, performance, literature, and film programmes. In particular, the Visaraloka “Expanded Media” exhibition would feature important voices in the visual arts from Indonesia, the Southeast Asian region, and beyond.
Themed “Subak: Bersama Menuju Harmoni (Subak: Together Towards Harmony),” the festival drew inspiration from the traditional Balinese irrigation system of subak — at once a communal form of resource management, and a reflection of the Tri Kita Harana (three causes of well-being) philosophy, emphasising harmonious relationships with God, man, and nature.
As I would soon find out, these themes of spirituality, community, ecological awareness, and interconnection threaded continually throughout the festival as a whole.
Bodies performing
Our first stop: the Tonyraka Art Gallery, a sprawling, verdant compound where traditional sculpture and contemporary installation exist side by side. As we walked by the scattered one-storey buildings and burbling fish ponds, we passed a patch of white canvas on the green lawn. On an elevated platform, a man wearing black stood perfectly still, with one arm raised. A second man, wearing white, crouched to trace the first man’s shadow in ink.
This was a performance piece by Indonesian artist Yulit Prayitno. For three days, he would spend eight hours each day, from sunrise to sunset, carefully marking down shadows and through them the passage of time. Under the searing sun, he and his collaborators sacrificed physical comfort for expression — appropriate for this festival section’s theme of the body in art.
A plaintive voice lured us towards one of the buildings, where we found a giant bamboo cage, surrounded by piles of yellow corn cobs. Inside the cage, the Serbian opera singer and performance artist Aleksander Timotić sang, stripped the cobs by hand, and tossed the kernels towards several live chickens, their feathers dyed in unnatural shades (a controversial practice to attract customers). Entitled Domestication, this piece was Timotić’s means of confronting his fear of chickens and reflecting upon how humans have tamed animals for their material needs.
In the context of a contemporary art festival, the simple chore became a strange ritual with an unknown purpose. As Timotić’s powerful voice ascended to the rafters, we were invited to sit down and strip the corn ourselves.
I found myself seated next to Helianti Hilman, a leading sustainable food activist and entrepreneur, who showed me how to push the tough, jewel-like kernels towards the base of the cob. This way, they fell away easily instead of hurting tender fingers.
“After a while, it becomes quite therapeutic,” Hilman said, and she was right. In our era of hyper-commercialised, mass-produced food, there was no reason to do this. And yet there was something pleasantly meditative about the repetitive, inefficient act of plucking out the kernels, one by one.
Some enchanted evening
Our first day in Bali ended with the Maha Wasundari opening ceremony at the Chandra Muka field in Batubalan. In the golden-hour sunlight, viewers, from seniors to students, found their places on rattan mats under a sliver of a moon.
Seated on stage risers made to resemble terraced rice fields, gamelan (a traditional musical ensemble) players opened the night with the dulcet tones of various percussion instruments. We were treated to the deft, angular movements of Baris Jangkang, a ceremonial dance from Pelilit Village, and a complex Palawakya performance by veteran dancer Ni Luh Menek. Weaving through the audience, lively performers in mythical barong animal costumes earned the biggest cheers of the night.
Later that evening, beloved Indonesian actress, director, and festival “icon” Dian Sastrowardoyo, who was also presenting a short film at the festival, told us her thoughts: “[Indonesia Bertutur] is a melting pot of Indonesian local artists with artists from all over the world — we are gathered here in the context of subak.”
But what was especially interesting, in light of the festival’s international ambit, was the unapologetically local character of the opening night. While much of Indonesia Bertutur used the familiar formats of global contemporary art, Maha Wasundari was dominated by traditional music and performance. As an outsider, I received very little explanation for what was happening on-stage. And yet I felt charmed, rather than put off, by the ceremony’s reticence in translating itself. It reminded me that while festivals like this may court international visitors, local audiences must remain their most steadfast and invested participants.
Earth and extraction
On Day Two, our first stop was the Neka Art Museum, a private museum whose stately ochre buildings house an assortment of paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Under the theme Homeland that Keeps Calling, the artworks at this site addressed the effects of global industry and capitalism on the environment and our notions of home — ranging from Elia Nurvista’s (Indonesia) small ceramic army of human-tree hybrids, representing the destructive palm oil industry, to Daniel Kötter’s (Germany) virtual reality experience Water & Coltan, examining the costs of mining in Germany and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Some works melded organic and inorganic elements into a futuristic aesthetic reminiscent of sci-fi films. For Air Hidup (The Living Water), for instance, Monica Hapsari (Indonesia) formed papery strips of natural fibre, lit by LED strips, into a hive-like environment, centred on a circle of petri dishes in shocking colours and blooms. The polygonal metal structure of Irene Agrivina’s (Indonesia) Transpollutant contained live water ferns in miniature ecosystems, releasing and absorbing oxygen and carbon dioxide. From Hapsari’s work with a Java laboratory on how human contact with water influences microscopic life, to Agrivina’s interest in air quality and pollution, the works drew attention to the sometimes imperceptible effects we have on the natural world.
Kawita Vatanajyankur’s (Thailand) The Scale of Injustice combined the organic and the mechanical in a different way, blurring the lines between body and object. This video work featured a set of scales made of three human figures (played by the artist herself) against a bright red backdrop suggestive of flesh and blood. The baskets on the scales were filled with cotton seeds, referencing the agricultural industry. Every so often, a falling seed would tip the scales out of balance, and one side would crash violently down — a chilling representation of how systems of production exploit human bodies.
To me, the standout work at the Neka Art Museum was Balinese artist Dodik Cahyendra’s Pulau, a poetic critique of overconsumption. For this work, Dodik printed photographs of fruit on four clear acrylic sheets and suspended them from the ceiling. Heaped in vast quantities, the fruits resembled nothing so much as mountains fading into the mist. Flanking the four mountains were images of one or two isolated fruits upon a sandy ground. With a little imagination, a rotting pear could transform into a floating island.
Recounting conversations with his friends, Dodik explained to me that ritual offerings of fruit could be seen as reflecting the changing landscapes of Bali; as he grew into adulthood, he witnessed stacks of local fruit morphing into ones of imported cherries, lychees, and pears. I came away compelled by the imaginative elision of fruit and landscape and the powerful representation of our unending appetites.
A new point of view
Our next stop of the day was the Museum Puri Lukisan, Bali’s oldest art museum, founded in 1954 by the late king of Ubud. Fronted by a large, tiered stone gate, the compound opened out into a grassy expanse of stepped terraces. Against this bucolic scene stood a miniature greenhouse-like structure, made of glass and metal and raised above the ground. People were lining up to enter, heads disappearing into the structure, leaving their bodies visible only from the neck down. This was Takashi Kuribayashi’s (Japan) Garden (Klakat Bali).
I waited my turn to step into the “greenhouse,” which was filled with soil, water, and various animals and plants. Suddenly, I was in a miniature jungle, face-to-face with a burbling freshwater fish. The exterior world fell away; a strange tang filled the air.
Enclosing its viewers within a tiny cosmos, to be observed by shrimp and fish, Garden had the effect of a fishbowl in reverse. Through the installation, I was told, the artist intended to encourage us to care for the gardens in our hearts.
Heading deeper into the complex, we came across an artist talk, taking place under a pavilion in the open air. Nearby, Indah Arysad’s (Indonesia) AMRTA installation, incorporating bamboo poles and Balinese instruments, made clanging sounds over the water. In the dim coolness of an exhibition building, I found a selection of works by Yudha Kusuma Putera, an Indonesian artist.
On the tiled floor lay clusters of rocks, illuminated by flashlights. Above these hung a series of art prints — surreal collages of archival photographs and images of gemstones. In one print, banded stones replaced two dancers’ heads; elsewhere, faceted jewels hovered about hands, mouths, and eyes.
Just across from these prints sat a low platform, covered by a photo of a Yogyakarta river lit from behind. Following the arc of the river was a line of stones in various shapes, sizes, colours, and translucencies. A gallery sitter informed me that the stones hailed from across Indonesia, inviting me to use a magnifying loupe to take a closer look.
I held the loupe, and below it a rock, to my eye. Viewed in this way — the magnifying tool scraping gently across cragged and variegated surfaces — the stones shifted in appearance. Every crevasse became enormous, as though my eye was sweeping across the Grand Canyon or the surface of Mars.
What Yudha’s work intimated, to me, was the power and joy of a change in perspective — specifically in relation to our earth and its histories.
Endings and beginnings
Our very last stop: the ARMA Museum & Resort, a multipurpose complex boasting artworks from Bali and beyond as well as various villas, restaurants, and amenities. Thematically, the works here related especially to concepts of sound and time, from the tones of indigenous music to the disappearance of cultural traditions.
As with our first location, the Tonyraka Art Gallery, live performance was prominent here. Down one corridor stretched an outrageously colourful painting by Chinese artist Sun Xun. Beneath roiling brushstrokes and energetic depictions of wild animals — leaping foxes, birds with unfurled wings — was strewn an assortment of brushes, reference images, and paper plates covered with paint. Evidence of the artist at work: Sun had embarked on seven hours of live painting over two days of the festival, bridging the worlds of painting and performance.
Across from banners by Arahmaiani (Indonesia) — themselves used in performance — Singaporean artist Jason Lim shuffled barefoot through a circle of black volanic sand. He was in the process of creating a mandala, a meditative practice from Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In a darkened room, a video work played: grandmother of performance art Marina Abramović (Serbia), celebrated actor William Dafoe, and a gaggle of yellow snakes engaged in a silent pantomime.
Elsewhere on the grounds, other video and photographic works explored the traditional and the absurd: Wimo Ambala Bayang’s (Indonesia) photo prints incongruously teleported a pink-maned white horse into various locations like a water slide and a historic ruin site, while Samson Young’s (Hong Kong) film featured lion dancers moving, without the usual roisterous accompaniment, in uncanny quiet.
But my favourite work at the ARMA site was Sharon Joetama’s Out of Focus, which straightforwardly, yet memorably, responded to the festival theme of subak. For this work, the Jakarta-born photographer sandwiched four images of Bali — its rice fields and construction sites — between two sets of clear plates, filling these with water, silt, moss, and debris. Placed on swivels, the double-sided images invited viewers to turn them, such that the multiple scenes, of flooded fields, metal rebar, and plastic trash, flitted back and forth in the mind’s eye. Upon this movement, the water and silt in front of the pictures would minutely stir and settle.
Out of Focus called into question Bali’s rapid, irreversible advancement, the threat it posed to subak and other features of the landscape, and the identity of the agents, foreign or local, behind these changes. Audience interaction was built into the work, Joetama explained, to suggest how everything we interact with necessarily changes over time.
This idea of interaction strikes me now as an apt way to think about the themes and ambitions of a festival like Indonesia Bertutur, where topics like ecology, interconnection, and development took centre stage. Undeniably, we, as contemporary humans, have wrought profound changes on our environments, traditions, and societies over the years, many of them negative. Yet, our ability to transform the world — not just physically but also imaginatively and psychically — simply by interacting with it is also a powerful gift. And it is often artists who remind us of this power, in Bali and far beyond.
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Indonesia Bertutur 2024 ran from 7–18 August 2024 in Ubud and Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. Read our interview with Artistic Director Melati Suryodarmo here.
Header image: The grounds of the Tonyraka Art Gallery.
