Kuyang Mengamank Patung Wanita Tugu Tani (Kuyang ‘Secures’ the female form of the Tugu Tani)

Kuyang Mengamank Patung Wanita Tugu Tani (Kuyang ‘Secures’ the female form of the Tugu Tani) 2022 Charcoal on paper collage, digital print, aluminium and plywood 180 cm × 78 cm × 10 cm

The Tugu Tani monument was my most significant impression when I first went to Jakarta. Without knowing anything about its history, the monument struck me for two reasons. First, because it was so proportioned and beautiful. But secondly and more importantly, the female figure was positioned significantly below the man, in a gesture of servitude.

I’d spent the first half of my career contemplating the impact of both architecture and monument—as vehicles of propaganda and maintaining the status quo of various Southeast Asian regimes. This monument literally cast women below men, in the public realm of Indonesia’s capital city.

When I was invited to the Jakarta Biennale in 2021, with the initial theme—Building History Together—this monument came back to mind. I had the idea to rebuild this piece of Jakarta’s history, but also to unpack the sexism contained in its original form.

In the early 1960s, the first Indonesian president Sukarno was conducting dual-diplomacy with both the US and the USSR, with an eye on including mineral-rich West Papua into the Indonesian archipelago. Russia responded with the gift of this monument in 1963, dedicated to the agricultural class. The fact that this farmer was armed raised the ire of the US and the Indonesian military as the monument was an ode to the then-existing Indonesian Communist Party.

In the early 1960s, Indonesia had a flourishing women's movement, which had come out of the fight for independence. In a study by Dutch sociologist Saskia Wieringa, she identifies hundreds of women’s groups at that time, working on education equality, labour rights,

marriage laws, and regulating the sex industry. The largest Indonesian women’s group was Gerwani, independent from but associated with the Indonesian Communist Party. By the time this monument was built in 1963, Gerwani was the largest women’s organization in Southeast Asia, and not only opposed the subservience of women to men, but also Sukarno’s polygamy. Clearly, this monument did not represent Indonesian women, but rather Sukarno’s image of what they should be.

I set about reconstructing the monument— maintaining its recognizable pose - but tweaking it in parts. The monument’s delicate feet became stumpy and wide, her form more robust, and her face replaced with my own, but with an expression of annoyance—annoyance not only at this disconnect between history and its representation, but also at the fact that Gerwani, and all its progress they had made, had been wiped out in 1965, in the infamous coup-attempt that marked the end of communism in Indonesia.

I had to find a way to represent the women’s movement not represented in the monument or in history. I designed a three-channel video to offset the monument’s frozen subservient pose, with a monochromatic flurry of action and flight. Once the installation was up, she looked more like she was casting a spell than serving a meal, so I named the work—Casting Spells for the Movement.