Tintin Wulia: Secrets

TINTIN WULIA SECRETS

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Some Memory Prevails 2019 (detail), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past, present and emerging.

RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.

The artist dedicates the exhibition to her late uncle, Gert Grondowski (1960-2023).

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, (Re)collections of Togetherness – Stage 12 2007–23 (detail), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Liminal Death 2022–23, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne 2023.

CONTENTS 1

Foreword

by Paula Toal

3

Tintin Wulia: Secrets

by Andrew Tetzlaff

9

The absent present: Tintin Wulia’s Secrets

by Wulan Dirgantoro

17 The fabric of secrecy

by William Walters 21 Not telling: my lacuna in Tintin Wulia: Secrets

by Mikael Johani 29 No secrets

by Ken Setiawan 35 Artist biography 37 Contributors 40 List of works

FOREWORD

RMIT Culture is thrilled to present Tintin Wulia: Secrets at RMIT Gallery.

This significant exhibition celebrates the art practice of prominent RMIT alum Tintin Wulia.

Wulia graduated with a PhD from RMIT’s School of Art in 2014. Her doctoral project centred on making artworks that related to, or investigated, the geopolitical border.

The project focused on listening to voices that were historically underrepresented within border politics, those of migrant and marginalised publics. Through her creative research Wulia challenged the normative concept of borders, revealing them to be much more complex than implied.

RMIT Culture is proud to host this project and to foreground Wulia’s work and the critical issues it raises. It was especially exciting to see the artist engaging with one of RMIT Culture’s treasured collections, the Australian Film Institute Research Collection (AFIRC) in the 1

development of a new work. Through her works Wulia evokes images of an interconnected and dynamic world – not a world that is borderless and idealistic but one that is real and centred around the people who live in it. Her exhibition is an important reminder of both the privilege and the responsibly of global citizenship.

Since finishing her studies at RMIT, Wulia has continued to interrogate globalisation in her practice. She received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2018 and has exhibited in major institutions and biennales, including representing Indonesia in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Since 2021 Wulia has been a senior researcher at HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenberg in Sweden and in 2022 she received the highly competitive European Research Council Starting Grant for research that is showcased in this exhibition.

I extend warm and sincere thanks to Tintin for her energy and enthusiasm. I also acknowledge the many individuals who collaborated on this project and the support of the University of Gothenburg and the Swedish Resarch Council.

I personally wish to thank the RMIT Culture Team for their professionalism and commitment. This includes Andrew Tetzlaff for his curatorial work on this project as well as the Galleries team led by Helen Rayment, the Production team led by Erik North, and the AFIRC, managed by Elizabeth Marsden and led by Olympia Barron. Further, for their continued support of RMIT Culture I extend appreciation to Amy Harrington, Associate Director Partnerships, and Saskia Loer Hansen, Deputy Vice Chancellor and Vice President, International and Engagement.

Paula Toal Head, RMIT Culture

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, (Re)collections of Togetherness – Stage 12 2007–23, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

TINTIN WULIA: SECRETS Andrew Tetzlaff

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

– Robert Frost1

Secrets surround us and permeate our lives.

They exist in our homes and our offices; between friends, institutions and even complete strangers. They are written in personal letters, on company letterheads and in classified documents.

For corporations, nondisclosure agreements protect commercial interests. For governments, the administration of state secrets is formally organised by department and is used as a means of exercising political power. Whether personal, political, significant or completely banal, secrets are always held close – they are, in fact, defined by their nondisclosure.

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For artist Tintin Wulia, secrets are important not so much for what they are, but for what they might reveal about us and how holding them can shape who we are. A secret shared can be a foundation of a relationship, a business, or a culture – a way of coming together in solidarity through the knowing of privileged or private information. There is power in secrets, and while they can be used as a tool to unite, they can also be used more forcibly to exert control or harm.

Receiving a secret is a responsibility, and having one, a weight.

Wulia grew up with a family secret that she held for most her life and which informs her identity to this day. In December 1965, her grandfather was one of thousands who were forcibly “disappeared” as a

response to a presumed affiliation with the Indonesian communist party. He was a victim of one of the worst massacres since the Second World War that went comparatively unnoticed by the world: the Indonesian mass killings.2 On one level, this secret was a sensitive and private family matter; on another, it was deeply political. The events occurred before Wulia was born, but due to political tensions in Indonesia could not be openly spoken about until 33 years later, after President Suharto’s resignation in 1998.3 Wulia’s work December (2021) shares this story with us, offering December 1965 as a potential starting point to this narrative.

From another perspective though, December is a midpoint, a date that follows 1 October 1965 and the start of the killings. December is also an ending. There is a non-linear and fractured sense of time that recurs across Wulia’s art practice, which offers a more complex and present understanding of our histories. Her work reveals December 1965

to be significant not just because of what occurred that month, but also because of what led to it and what happened after it.

Here, time is less like a line and more like slice through geological time – a dense continuum in which events echo in all directions.

Here, the atrocities that began in 1965 are present today – as much as they were in deeper histories, as much as they will be in distant futures.

In addition to showing us how events are entangled across time, Wulia’s works show us how they are enmeshed within broader global ecologies of culture, politics and finance. Her works resist the urge to reduce things to a singular form – instead their plurality provides a more collectively accurate, holistic and complete representation. Even with respect to 1965 – a year with such personal resonance for Wulia – her works shows it as more than just one thing. It is a year that marks the beginning of the Indonesian mass killings but also Singapore’s independence,

the assassination of Malcolm X, the first spacecraft flyby of the planet Mars (as alluded to in her work One Thousand and One Martian Nights), and so on. The year 1965 is a multiplicity – a collection of causal, tangential and completely unrelated events. While this may seem obvious, the recognition of things as complex and more than the sum of their parts does not always inform our recorded histories. Sometimes alternative perspectives aren’t known and sometimes they cannot be spoken freely about. Secrets – those that we hold dear, those that we wish we didn’t know, and those that we might not even be privy to – shape our understandings of the past, present and future. In 1965, Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara self-censored his triptych Title (1965), removing the words “RED CHINA” and replacing them with “ONE THING”.4 Across three monochromatic deep-pink canvases we now read the words: “ONE THING”, “1965”, “VIET-NAM”. But, as noted earlier – and as Kawara must have known though from his premeditated occlusion – 4

1965 was more than just “ONE THING”. Wulia, who developed Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 in 2019 in response to Kawara’s Title, made the following observations of Kawara’s edit: I know that Kawara knew that 1965 was not just ONE THING. I think if I wanted to do a political work in 1965, like he did, I may have ended up doing the same thing. Time, an aspect in declassification as well, made it possible for me to make Subtext.5 Again, time becomes an important element in the reading of Wulia’s artwork – not only for how its linearity is eschewed, but for how its passage creates a safe distance for reflection and comment. Here, time provides Wulia with an opportunity for public resistance, a chance to oppose reductionist approaches and dominant narratives. She uses this time to delve into histories that haven’t been heard over the din of louder global power-players, 5

to draw links to clandestine political and commercial narratives, and to acknowledge the reverberating impact of personal voices within global conversations. Wulia’s works remind us of the scale of the world and the power of people. They show us that things do not occur in isolation. Rather they occur in relation, they occur to people, and they have an impact on the future. Her works reveal how we are connected to, and implicated in, histories of which we may not even be conscious: 1965 is as much a part of our world as much as it is hers.

Wulia’s work invites us to reflect on our own social identities and the responsibilities that come with global citizenship.

Within this discussion, Wulia is intent on listening more than she speaks. Her practice functions socially, engaging with audiences and even articulating itself through the public as a kind of medium. She uses art-making as a tool for listening, but also as a methodology for experimentation, creative evolution and distribution. Her

work is like an open-ended music score made for interpretation by its players: it simply proposes a direction or a start to a conversation rather than presuming it is the final form.

While Wulia listens to multiple communities, she pays particular attention to marginalised communities. There is a potency to this approach. Not only do her works acknowledge and support the agency of these groups, they are also thoroughly enriched by them – in a way that they could not be by others – due to the knowledge these groups offer. All knowledge is only ever partial – just as a satellite’s view of a planet is a limited one, an individual’s understanding invariably contains edges and blind spots. And just as multiple satellites produce a more comprehensive picture, alternate perspectives on a subject provide a clearer understanding of it. The knowledge within a marginalised community is inherently complex due to its existence outside the dominant discourse, a position

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 2019, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

that gives marginalised people an incentive to understand perspectives other than their own. To this point, scholars have argued that the formation of a more objective view of the world depends largely on the voice of the marginalised.6

NOTES

The “players” of Wulia’s works are not limited to her immediate collaborators, they also include the people with whom she shares her secrets: us. This exhibition is an intimate offering of knowledge, a statement of disclosure to each of us that brings us together and invites our participation. Wulia’s works are living conversations to listen to, reflect upon, discuss and debate. They are prompts for change – not for a hasty impulsive or reactionary change, but rather for change born out of wide consultation and consideration within an ethical framework. Her works lead by example, showing us how by listening we can come to a more holistic perspective from which we can negotiate and collaborate towards a more progressive and socially just future.

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1

Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits,” in A Witness Tree (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1942), 71.

2

Richard Skretteberg, “Indonesia: The Massacre the World Forgot,” Norwegian Refugee Council, 1 December 2015, https://www.nrc.no/perspectives/2015/nr-4/the-massacre-the-worldforgot.

3

Tintin Wulia, “The Name Game,” Inside Indonesia, 12 October 2008, https://www.insideindonesia.org/archive/articles/the-name-game.

4

Japanese curator Masayoshi Honma disclosed this information in an article later used by art historian Jung-Ah Woo to reinterpret Kawara’s work Title 1965. See Jung-Ah Woo, “On Kawara’s ‘Date Paintings’: Series of Horror and Boredom,” Art Journal 69, no. 3 (2010): 62–72.

5

Tintin Wulia, correspondence with the author, 12 November 2023.

6

See Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 124, 150; also Kristina Rolin, “Standpoint theory as a methodology for the study of power relations,” Hypatia 24, no. 4 (2009): 218–26.

Installation view, Letter to Mr J E England, Secretary of the Main Roads Commission, from an anonymous person, claiming a Russian employee of Main Roads is associated with Communists, 3 July 1930 reproduction on newsprint, printed 1 December 2023 Collection of Queensland State Archives, IID DR5371, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023..

THE ABSENT PRESENT: TINTIN WULIA’S SECRETS Wulan Dirgantoro Over the past twenty years, Tintin Wulia has been grappling with secrets, or, more precisely, the aftermath of secrets. By their nature, secrets are obscured, hidden or buried to hide information, facts or truth. At the same time, secrets will find their way out, through leaks, slippages or full disclosure. In the exhibition Tintin Wulia: Secrets, a project developed in part by working through what the artist calls the “Protocols of Killings” archive, she confronts us with one of the most widespread covert actions in modern history. This archive, which was declassified in 2018, contains cables that passed through the US Embassy in Jakarta in the period 1964–68: a wide-ranging record of communications during the critical period surrounding the 1965–66 Indonesian anti-communist mass killings. Wulia’s current project seeks to visualise the entire 35,642 pages of the archive.

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The event that precipitated these communications was the mass killings that targeted alleged members and sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in the aftermath of a failed coup by a group of armed militants who were members of the National Armed Forces. The killings that occurred between October 1965 and March 1966 claimed over half a million lives through imprisonment, torture, killings and exile.

The victims were not only alleged members of the PKI but also members of Gerwani, a progressive women’s group; trade unionists; ethnic Chinese; and other alleged leftists. The failed coup paved the way for Suharto’s rise to power and established an authoritarian regime that suppressed the truth about the killings for three decades.

The declassification of this archive revealed the secret collaboration between the world’s leading democracies during the height of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. In her research, Wulia discovered that the interembassy communication in the archive

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Absence in Substantia: Density 2023 (detail), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 2019, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

confirmed that such democracies enabled the massacres under the Suharto regime. In 2021, in one of her first examinations of the archive, she reconceptualised the notion of distance, warfare and accountability by involving the public in various group performances. During a symposium at the University of Melbourne, which I convened with the research collective 1965 Setiap Hari (Living 1965),1 Wulia invited Dialita Choir, a choir consisting of female survivors and survivor’s family members over the age of fifty, to collaborate in the online participatory performance Ingatkah Saat Itu (Remember When) (2021).2 The game, which included the audience members, was a series of linked stories that made up one big tale.

Each participant, beginning with the members of Dialita, was asked to contribute one sentence before passing the baton to the next person.

As each participant contributed their voice – or, in the case of some Dialita members, sang

lyrics from their song – what emerged was a powerful, communal act of remembering, a combination of staged and spontaneous storytelling and singing that bridged generations, geographies, race and gender.

What started as a deeply personal family secret of her grandfather’s disappearance in December 1965 turned into a shared, empathic narrative through emotional copresence.

Importantly, Wulia’s examination of the 1965– 66 killings has been centred in connective memory work; that is, memory as structured by digital networks and constituted between people, social institutions and technological media. In her work Subtext – After Kawara’s Title, 1965 (2019), Wulia elucidates the impact of US territorial actions and the interconnectedness of diverse but simultaneous world events. She looks at the 1965–66 events as a “thing-in-common”, as a “meeting point that triggers connection between different agents”. During an artist

residency at the Smithsonian Institute in 2019, Wulia came across On Kawara’s work Title (1965) at the National Gallery of Art.3 She recalls being upset by the bold link between the words painted on its three canvases: “ONE THING”, “1965” and “VIET-NAM”, which seemed to indicate that, for Kawara, the year 1965 was marked by only “one thing”, namely the Vietnam War. Wulia reflected that her family history might have triggered her intense reaction.4 She then decided to expand the “one thing” of Kawara’s work to Indonesia’s anti-communist massacres.5 She recreated two of Kawara’s paintings and added multiple canvases that travel across the gallery’s walls, ceilings and floor to highlight the spatial and temporal dis/ connections between her family history, the Indonesian anti-communist killings and global history.

In Absence in Substantia: Density (2023) Wulia continues her exploration and reconstruction of the memories of 1965–66,

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this time focusing on secrecy.6 Wulia extends William Walters’s idea of “dis/closure”, whereby public inquiries into state secrets not only generate disclosure but create further closures, showing that such closures can reveal patterns that betray the state’s behaviour.7 From the Withdrawal Notices, she extracted dates when documents had been classified and created graphs that show the frequency and density of retractions over time. In Absence, this pattern of dates peaks around the first day of the killings – 1 October 1965 – and is visualised as a graph on one side of the work and an eruption of a shredded material on the other, in a play with (in)visibility and materiality that discloses something previously hidden.

For Wulia, her recent body of work is an exercise in aesthetic resistance. She reconceptualises the aesthetic of resistance as something embodied, a transportable vehicular tool to stimulate imagination and emotion and relate directly to the sensory.8

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The latter is important as we observe Ingatkah Saat Itu (2021), Subtext – After Kawara’s Title, 1965 (2019) and Absence in Substantia: Density (2023). The materiality of these installations is not only the media of secrecy – as discussed by William Walters in this exhibition catalogue (p 17) – but also involves a form of memory work through the artist’s labour and bodily experience. Wulia describes how she used paper nylon fabric for Absence in Substantia: Density because of its similarity to paper. The artist then used a combination of weaving and tufting to painstakingly construct the work; unlike a fabric made from wool or cotton, paper nylon is fragile and not commonly used for tufting.

Wulia explains how the yarn regularly slipped and broke, so she had to rethread the yarn onto the tufting gun multiple times to finish the work.9 Such deliberate and conscious labour emphasises materiality and creates mnemonic effects through an evocation of the sensory aspect of remembering and knowing.

Importantly, the exhibition is also about forgetting. Indonesian visual artists have persistently spoken about and visualised the anti-communist mass killings since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, to evoke and elicit remembering of the massacres.

Their art practices use traces and fragments – both in the narratives of the massacres as told by the survivors and from material found in archives, photographs and objects – to evoke absence and loss.10 As a thirdgeneration Indonesian post 1965, Wulia is acutely aware of the dwindling number of survivors of the massacres in Indonesia and in exile. The urgency to preserve and keep alive the narratives of the victims and survivors by Indonesian artists and scholars situates their practice as a strategic memory work. Here, Wulia’s artworks demonstrate how memory work does not create merely a passive repository, but is an active intervention in the form of a practice.

NOTES 1

Living 1965 is a research-relay collective comprising artists, designers, journalists and researchers based in Indonesia, Australia, Sweden and the United States. The collective focuses on researching and disseminating narratives of the 1965–66 massacres by working together with survivors and family members. The author and Tintin Wulia are members of the collective. See https://linktr.ee/1965setiaphari.

2

See Living 1965, “Aesthetics, Memory And The Future of 1965 Indonesia”, Centre of Visual Art, The University of Melbourne, https://sites.research.unimelb.edu.au/cova/projects/symposia/ symposia-and-seminars-2021/dialogues/living-1965.

3

See Jung-Ah Woo, “On Kawara’s Date Paintings: Series of Horror and Boredom,” Art Journal 69, no 3 (2010) 62–72.

4

See Tintin Wulia, “The Name Game,” Inside Indonesia, 12 October 2008, http://www.insideindonesia.org/the-name-game.

5

Tintin Wulia, Ways of Making: Cooperating with Things-in-Common, video recording of lecture, 25 September 2020, RMIT School of Art, Melbourne, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dUWBn8fGdU.

6

The work is a part of a series. Another work in the series Absence in Substantia: Frequency will be shown at BAIK ART Jakarta, 10 December 2023 – 09 February 2024.

7

William Walters, State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2021).

8

Tintin Wulia, “Aesthetic Resistance: Publicness, Potentiality, and Plexus,” Journal of Political Power 16, no 2 (2023): 213–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2023.2245228.

9

Tintin Wulia, in conversation with the author, 2 November 2023.

10 See Wulan Dirgantoro, “After 1965: Historical Violence and the Strategies of Representation in Indonesian Visual Arts,” in Living Art: Indonesian Artists Engage Politics, Society and History, eds Elly Kent, Virginia Hooker and Caroline Turner (Canberra: ANU Press, 2023), 273–94.

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Absence in Substantia: Density 2023, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Absence in Substantia: Density 2023, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

Installation view of Tintin Wulia, December 2021 (projection), Absence in Substantia: Density 2023 (on left) and Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 2019 (on wall), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

THE FABRIC OF SECRECY William Walters

Tintin Wulia’s Absence in Substantia: Density (2023) is a remarkable work. As with her previous installation December (2021), Wulia makes extensive use of the declassified archive of 30,000 pages of files from the US Embassy in Jakarta, collected from 1964 to 1968. These are documents which reveal the degree of complicity of American officials in the mass killing of Indonesian citizens deemed communist sympathisers during this period. Whereas December transforms these declassified pages into a stream of projected images, Absence in Substantia: Density (which has a companion piece, Absence in Substantia: Frequency) turns them into fabric which is shredded and then playfully tufted to make something startlingly new. With this work, Wulia makes three moves that will inspire anyone interested in the aesthetic politics of secrecy.

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First, Absence is about the media of secrecy. More precisely, it is about the place of paper in the infrastructure of state secrecy. To construct the installation, Wulia took declassified documents that had originally been printed on paper and transformed these artefacts into fabric. With this gesture Wulia unsettles an arrangement we easily overlook – for much of the last century state secrecy has entailed various powers exercised over and through the control of papers on a truly massive scale. In a literal and visible way, these papers bear the insignia of secrecy, whether in the form of various stamps, authorisation codes and dates which declare that they are now “declassified” or older layers of marking that indicate previous level of classification: “Confidential”, “Secret”, “Limited Official Use”. The philosopher Ian Hacking has described the exponential growth of official statistics at the start of the nineteenth century as an “avalanche of printed numbers”, emphasising how it was an infrastructure

of paper that mediated the rise of biopolitics.1 It was only through this circulation and accumulation of paper numbers that the state came to continuously see and know the health and wealth of its population.

Precisely because she moves beyond paper, Wulia helps us see that state secrecy under modernity entailed an avalanche of printed secrets. As the age of the digital secret dawns (not to mention its correlate, the digital leak) we should be able to grasp this fact more readily.

Second, Wulia’s installation is about the power of shredding. Once the declassified files have been printed onto fabric, she proceeds to shred the textiles. Like classification and declassification, the “lowly paper shredder” can also be regarded as a technology of secrecy,2 indeed a mechanical technology that truly came into its own the more that offices and governments became networks of “paper knowledge”.3 Document destruction is, of course, a routine and mostly invisible feature of the governance

of information. Only in moments of scandal and crisis does it explode into public view.

Think of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s revelation before the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987 of how he had shredded much of the paper trail concerning the covert arms-for-hostages operation.4 Think of the Stasi secret police desperately shredding their files in the dying months and days of East German communism, tearing files by hand when the shredders overheated, halting only when the pro-democracy demonstrators burst into their headquarters.5 So what is at stake when it is not the diplomat, conspirator or secret police doing the shredding but the artist? And what does it mean when it is not live secrets that are being shredded but declassified documents that are already in the public domain? For one thing, we can say Wulia makes the documents more public by destroying them. This is necessary since declassification alone is no guarantee of public awareness. Perhaps we can also say Wulia is unsettling the act of shredding itself. Anyone with a shredder can destroy

documents. But Wulia is shredding the papers of state – or more accurately, what she has constituted as the fabric of the state – in public, thereby making newly intelligible how this otherwise banal activity can serve as an operation of power.

Third, and finally, Absence is about the power of reconstruction. If shredding has occasionally made the headlines as a crisisdriven effort to shore up the political secret, then so have certain attempts to reveal the secret by reconstructing the shredded archive. None were more spectacular than the efforts of the Iranian revolutionary students who stormed the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979. During their protracted occupation of the embassy, and while holding US diplomats hostage, they pieced together the vast mounds of shredded classified papers they had found. Eventually these reconstructions were published in 77 volumes as “Documents from the US Espionage Den”.6 A not dissimilar fate befell the shredded Stasi files.

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Aside from whatever knowledge might be gleaned from these kinds of painstaking activities, these moments of reconstruction are hugely symbolic events. At the same time as they display to the world the lengths to which an adversary has gone in order to preserve the secret, they demonstrate the staunch resistance of others to that secrecy. Wulia’s act of reconstruction taps into such energies.

But as we have seen, it is also quite different. It is performed not on documents that state actors have already shredded but on those she has shredded herself.

And it is an act of re-composition that comes late in the day – not in the heat of the moment, but many decades later.

In fact, Wulia’s act is not really a matter of reconstruction at all. It is not a question of restoring the original in the hope that its content can be revealed and its truth finally known. Instead, it is aimed at making

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something new. That something new is revealed on the other side of the textile, on which Wulia has tufted a graph that plots the incidence of withdrawal notices in the declassified archives. Withdrawal notices are markers, placeholders, for documents that were not released to the public. They are to the archive what a black square or rectangle is to the redacted page: visible testaments to the limits of declassification, signs of its contested boundaries. Wulia’s graph shows that the incidence of such notices cluster and peak around the time of the mass killings. In other words, it is typically diplomatic and intelligence traffic at the height of the killings that has eluded declassification and remained secret. Wulia’s graph makes absence present. It does not reveal what is missing but does make that absence palpable. As such, it offers us an inventive and necessary strategy for “writing secrecy”.

Or in this case, tufting secrecy.

To fabricate is to construct something, especially from assembled parts. To fabricate is also to invent something with the aim of deceiving. Wulia’s Absence in Substantia: Density is not an attempt to deceive but rather a fabrication that invites and equips us to reflect on other acts of deception, not least the deceptiveness of the declassified. This makes it especially valuable.

NOTES 1

Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5 (1982): 279¬–95.

2

Marianne Constable, “The Paper Shredder: Trails of Law,” Law Text Culture 23 (2019): 276–93.

3

Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

4

James Der Derian, “Arms, Hostages, and the Importance of Shredding in Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture (II),” Social Text 22 (1989): 79–91.

5

“The Last Days of the Stasi,” Deutsche Welle, 15 January 2005, https:// www.dw.com/en/the-last-day-of-the-stasi/a-1459519.

6

Federation of American Scientists, Secrecy and Government Bulletin 70 (September 1997), https://sgp.fas.org/bulletin/sec70.html.

7

Brian Rappert, “Writing Secrecy,” in Marieke de Goede, Esme Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins (eds), Secrecy and Methods in Security Research (New York: Routledge, 2019): 129–42.

Installation view of Tintin Wulia, December 2021 (projection) and Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 2019 (on wall), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

NOT TELLING: MY LACUNA IN TINTIN WULIA: SECRETS Mikael Johani In November 2017, my wife Anya, a poet, and I went to Senayan City, one of the glitziest, most elite (and elitist) malls in South Jakarta – often derided as the most bougie part of Jakarta, where its derogatory moniker “Jaksel”, an acronym for Jakarta Selatan (South Jakarta), is also shorthand for rich hipster kids who speak in Keminggris, aka English-ish, a newly developed parole that codeswitches freely between Indonesian, Jakarta slang and English. Senayan City is home to the Jakarta Fashion Week and curated sneaker stores where the latest limited-edition Jordan or Yeezy drop would attract a queue of hundreds. For those unfamiliar with the layout of the typical Jakarta elite malls, they’re often structured like an upside-down Borobudur, the 8thcentury Buddhist temple in Central Java with stone reliefs of Siddhartha Gautama’s hedonistic parties on the ground floor and plain stupas at the top representing the Buddha’s ascent to ascetic nirvana. In Jakarta malls, the banal business of eating and drinking is conducted in the restaurants 21

and food courts on the top floors; once you get your belly full, you descend towards the austere resplendence of the designer stores on the ground floor, where the gods of Dior, Prada, Gucci et al reside. We went there to see the last day of Tintin Wulia’s A Thousand and One Martian Nights (2017) installation, in which I had a bit part as an amateur actor in a mock-documentary playing a third-generation Earth emigré in a Martian terraform that resembled a rusunami, the Indonesian acronym for subsidised government apartment, often made into a pun as rusunnya orang miskin or a poor man’s flat. Ratri Ninditya, a poet friend of mine, who used to live in an infamous rusunami called Kalibata City, or Kalcit in Jaksel (which, like many other spaces in Jakarta, had lost its government subsidy and was soon commercialised), had at that time only just released a poetry collection called Rusunothing, in which some of the poems were inspired by the Indonesia in microcosm that was Kalcit.

Tintin’s A Thousand and One Martian

Nights, according to the flyer, was located in the “Indonesian Pavilion”. Of course, no one we asked for directions in the mall, even the satpam (security guards), knew where it was. When we finally found it, it was, of course, nestled in a forgotten corner of the top floor, which in my memory was last used to host a Japanese denim convention – next to the escalators, just up from the Korean bakery Tous les jours. It was deserted. No one was there, not a soul.

There was a camera set up inside the pavilion that was supposed to broadcast what was happening inside to the “sister” installation at the Venice Biennale, also by Tintin, just as the TV screen in Jakarta was supposed to show us what was happening inside the exhibition in Venice. Of course, neither the camera nor the TV screen could be turned on.

The Martian terraform community in the work was supposed to be set in 2165, 200 years after a dictator on Earth started

Installation view of Tintin Wulia, Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 2019 (foreground) and A Thousand and One Martian Nights 2017 (projection), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

sending political prisoners to the red planet (for those familiar with Indonesia’s Cold War history, no prize for guessing who the dictator was supposed to resemble).

I cringed seeing my heavy-handed nonacting of the Gen 3 Martian (Martiallennial?) character and turned my eyes towards a honeycomb-like installation of a perspex Legoland slash Martian rusunothing model that seemed to perfectly encapsulate the complex, labyrinthine pile-up of facts and lies that make up Indonesian history since the mass killings of communists in 1965 – something both fragile and too complex to disentangle. The thousands of tiny cables and wires connecting the motion sensors and lights under the acrylic looked like pale arteries which could spurt blood anytime.

Or, as I was imagining at the time, they were the white-hot vapours of rocket fuel, and the whole installation was going to lift off and take me and Anya to Mars. Or at least Venice.

Mikael Johani at Tintin Wulia’s installation in Senayan City, Jakarta, 2017, part of her exhibition at the Indonesian Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2017: Viva Arte Viva – Tintin Wulia: A Thousand and One Martian Nights, curated by Agung Hujatnikajennong. Photo by Mikael Johani.

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After we left the pavilion, we got ourselves a Blizzard at a Dairy Queen in the food court below. When the DQ girl turned the Blizzard cup with a spoon stuck inside the hardened ice cream upside-down, to show us it’d been made properly to specs, I thought, dayum, this Blizzard defies gravity and Tintin’s art can’t? What’s wrong with the world?

Scott Miller Berry, a Canadian filmmaker friend who programs the world’s first and largest arts and mental health festival in the world, Rendezvous With Madness, in Toronto, once gifted me a book called House of Psychotic Women by the Canadian film writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse – a cross between a memoir, autobiography and a super-long listicle of all the horror and gothic films featuring psychotic women characters that the author has seen and shown throughout her life. It’s become one of my favourite books ever, despite the fact that I will probably not have the chance to see 80% of the films listed in the book in my lifetime. At least not in a proper cinema.

Indonesian cinemas, ironically one of the most luxurious in the world in my experience, seem to show only Marvel movies. It reminds me of my childhood, when I was bougie enough to be supplied with magazines on Western music, films, books, art (SPIN, Sight & Sound, The Face, etc), but not rich enough to actually get the CDs, VHS tapes or paperbacks to consume directly. But I didn’t mind; I loved using my imagination to supply the “absences in substantia”, Tintin’s term and method for her current exhibition at RMIT Gallery, Tintin Wulia: Secrets, which she explained to me over a Zoom call between Gothenburg and Jakarta.

Detail of hardware used in Tintin Wulia’s artwork installation, Senayan City, Jakarta, 2017. Photo by Mikael Johani.

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Tintin Wulia, A Thousand and One Martian Nights (still), 2017.

She was showing me a graph representing the numbers of the CIA’s Withdrawal of Notice of declassified materials – before, during and after the mass murders of Indonesian communists in 1965–66.

The super-high apex of the graph, which occurred on the infamous dates of 30 September – 1 October 1965, reminded me of the lacunae in Sappho’s poetic fragments that Anne Carson had kept in her translation to suggest what were also “absences in substantia”. Seen as text, the Withdrawal Notice graph shows the absence of texts and disappeared facts. But the lacunae are there for all to see, like bomb craters in Gaza where buildings used to stand. We know something is/was there, but we can no longer see it. In Carson’s translations of Sappho, we can only guess how many lines are missing. The white space on the page brims with sounds and meaning that feel as if we can almost grasp with our hands, but can’t.1

I started my career as a poet in Sydney, with a poem about a barista at the famous vegetarian cafe Badde Manors on Glebe Point Road, right next to Gleebooks, where I used to buy my copies of McSweeney’s and bought one of my poetic bibles, the pocket-size City Lights edition of Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. The poem, a bad pastiche of Robert Lowell (it was called, cringe, Limitations, after Lowell’s book of translations of canonical Western poems (including a Sappho!) called Imitations). The poem, the very first serious poem I’ve ever written, somehow won a commendation from an urban poetry contest organised by the old New South Wales Writers’ Centre (now Writing NSW) and led me to find out, among other things, how white the poetry scene was in Sydney in the early 2000s.

Lately I’ve been reading quite a lot of new Sydney writers, especially those out of Sweatshop, the culturally and linguistically diverse literacy movement based in Western Sydney, novels such as The Lebs by Michael

Mohammed Ahmad, poems by Omar Sakr, and my favourite, the Gen Z droll of the antibildungsroman Funny Ethnics by Shirley Le, a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant – an acerbic, ironic, sarcastic hot take of lyfe in-n-out of Yagoona on the Hume Highway, the site of the OG Macca’s in Australia. I’ve also been checking out online magazines such as Liminal, which publishes in-depth interviews with Asian-Australian artists, including the Indonesian-Australian Rama Parwata, avant-jazz drummer-composer, whose love of death and black metal I shared and made me look back with regret: What if, instead of learning my trade in a white Australian poetry space, I had found a more nurturing one like Sweatshop – perhaps I would not have felt the yearning to go back to Jakarta just to “find myself”.

As writers like Le have intimated in several podcasts and interviews, such as this one with Messie Minds, I would have been able to remain in Australia (not that this is necessarily a better thing to do) and if a nurturing space like Sweatshop had 26

existed for me then, I would have been able to get a head start on the long journey to my own “coming to voice” instead of staggering through a long stop–start beginning with isolation and loneliness as handicap.

In Indonesia, despite the dearth of noncommercial mainstream art spaces for a basic Jaksel kid like me and my family to visit – Museum MACAN, the city’s only major public contemporary art gallery is about the size of the TATE’s gift shop – people, artists, find a way to nurture their artistic practices.

Communities play a huge role; since my wife and I are poets with day jobs, we’ve had to supplement our on-the-fly, in-a-cab, on-theMRT writing habits — stealing time from the drudgery of work and more visits to the malls – with hosting a spoken word night called Pavilun Puisi every month without fail since 2017. During the pandemic we persisted on Zoom and even gained many readers from outside Jakarta and Indonesia. Before that, my wife Anya started up one of the first 27

online poetry communities in Indonesia – on the now defunct Yahoo! Groups mailing list – when the works of young poets writing in everyday language were labelled “rubbish that belongs only in the bin” by the gatekeepers. Just like the mailing list, our spoken word nights are free of charge, and we don’t have to pay the bar venue for the space either; we made a deal, we fill your bar with people, and you fill us with Amer, our own Fruity Lexia, and cheap beer. The night is packed every month and though sometimes we wish we had a better amp, better lighting, or at least a mic stand that doesn’t go limp every time, and a proper white box where our voices and words can be heard more clearly, I actually enjoy being made come alive again, every time, just sitting at the back of the stage watching the young poets perform and enjoying the faint breeze coming through the banana groves on the banks of the creek above which the bar platform is built. Artists struggling to find a crowd or fans or buyers often quote lyrics from our famous indie rock band–human

rights activists Efek Rumah Kaca, “Pasar bisa diciptakan” (“Markets can always be created”); but a lot of them do not realise the eponymous song is also a plaintive cry as well as a call-to-arms. As Cholil, the lead singer sang in the verse of the song, Kami mau yang lebih indah Bukan hanya remah-remah sepah Sudahlah (“We want something more beautiful, not just crumbs, stale crumbs, what can you do?”)

Kami ingin lebih bergizi Bukan hanya yang malnutrisi Substansi (“We want to be well-fed, not malnourished, [so we can produce something] substantial.”)

As Tintin walked me through a 3D map of the Secrets exhibition at the RMIT Gallery though a shared screen on Zoom, which also included the aforementioned A Thousand and One Martian Nights in what looked like a side annex, my imagination ran wild. This is just like those times imagining what Pulp at Glastonbury 1995 would’ve been like from an article on Q, or reading about They Call Her One Eye, one of Kier-La Janisse’s favourite horror films she described lovingly in the House of Psychotic Women (which we can read as one long, massive, Zoom share-screen presentation) – my physical body will never make it there, to Tintin’s Secrets housed in a neat gallery in Narrm; all I get is crumbs, but still I ate.

NOTES 1

In Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Vintage Books, New York, 2002.

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, A Thousand and One Martian Nights 2017, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

NO SECRETS Ken Setiawan

I cannot remember a time when I did not know what happened in Indonesia in 1965 or, more precisely, when I did not know what had happened to my father in the years that followed. When I try to think about when my parents told me about what happened my father, I cannot remember them ever sitting me down for a talk or anything like that. I just always knew. As I once told a friend whose parents had told her that my father had been in jail, as if it was something bad: “My father went to prison for nothing.” It did not bother me; I was proud of it.

During Suharto’s New Order it would have been perhaps easier for my parents to accuse and despise Indonesian leftists of the Sukarno period. It was what most people did. My father could also have distanced himself from the left-wing ideas and organisation that he endorsed, belonged to and promoted in his younger years. He could have been ashamed of the nine years of imprisonment without charge, without trial, and of what he had endured in inhumane circumstances. Or my parents could have remained silent and keep my father’s story a secret from me. In some ways that would have been easy, as I was born after his release from jail and thus have no real memory of his imprisonment. But they did not do any of these things.

My father’s experience was evident in his meticulous early morning routines of boiling water and sweeping the floor (as he did in jail every morning) and in the simple toys he crafted for me out of pomelo skin (“just like the children on Buru”).

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Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Untold Movements - Act 1: Neitherland, Witherland, Hitherland, 2015, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne 2023.

About my parents’ decision to be open about my father’s past, my mother once wrote: I do not think a child likes her father if she gets the feeling that something from his past is being concealed from her. A part of her own past is hidden in the dark at the same time.

How can a child respect her parents if they are not honest with her?1 And thus, my father’s cultural and political activism, his imprisonment, and especially his years on the penal island of Buru, were part of our everyday life. There was an old dresser in my parents’ bedroom and in one of the drawers they kept small artefacts from my father’s time in prison – including pieces of cardboard that had my father’s prison numbers on them. One birthday, my parents gave me a recipe book of “family recipes”. My father contributed his recipe for nasi goreng, but also “recipes” for meals cooked by prisoners with the limited supplies they had (water, a bit of salt, some 31

green leaves, rice if they were lucky). And then there were physical reminders of his time in jail: I knew that my father was deaf in one ear because he had been tortured by a prison guard, who put a cricket in his ear. I grew up with these stories and experiences. These stories are an inherent part of my family’s history and, as such, of me.

I do not doubt my mother’s reasons for being open about my father’s experiences. But it was more than that. Indonesia’s New Order was characterised by anti-communism.

The killings, disappearances and mass arrests of that period were not part of public discussions or official histories. If anything, the violence that Indonesia witnessed was considered justifiable, and people like my father were treated like outcasts. I knew this too: my father had to report to authorities regularly. It was difficult for him to find work and he was not allowed to vote, or even go to another city without permission from the military. I also knew that while 1965 was so

present at home, it was not something we spoke about outside of the house.

In that atmosphere of no secrets and secrets, my father’s stories presented an alternate version of history in the intimate space of the family – a space often deemed apolitical, but how can it be when personal stories are entangled with national and political histories? Over time, I came to see my parents’ storytelling and the presence of 1965 in our everyday lives as an act of resistance. It was through these stories that I came to see Indonesia’s 1965, from a very young age, from the perspective of injustice and inhumanity. My family’s stories of 1965 defied New Order propaganda and history writing and denied the authoritarian regime further control over our lives.

In 2015 I visited Buru with my father.

Together, we stood on the beach where he had first arrived on the island 45 years earlier. At that time, a guard told my father

and other prisoners that they would never go back to Java and that they would die on the island. My father said about the guard: “He miscalculated.” Not only did my father physically survive, but he was not silent about his experiences. His story lives on in me and in our family. As I stood on the beach, I breathed in the air and felt free.

NOTE 1

Ruth Havelaar, Quartering: A Story of a Marriage in Indonesia during the Eighties (Clayton, Vic: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1991), 89.

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Untold Movements - Act 1: Neitherland, Witherland, Hitherland 2015, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

Installation view, Tintin Wulia, Memory is Frail (and Truth Falters) 2023, in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Tintin Wulia was born in 1972 in Denpasar, Indonesia. In 2003–13 she lived in Naarm/ Melbourne. Since 2013 she has been based in Meanjin/Brisbane and travels for projects and residencies.

Wulia is a multidisciplinary artist and a Senior Researcher at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is internationally recognised for her sociopolitical artworks and has contributed to over 200 international exhibitions and publications since 2000, including the Istanbul Biennial (2005), Moscow Biennale (2011), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Asia Pacific Triennial (2012), Sharjah Biennial (2013), and Chicago Architecture Biennial (2021). She represented Indonesia with a solo pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Her publications include a chapter in the award-winning edited volume Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (New York: Routledge, 2022).

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Wulia’s background in architecture and music (BEng in Architecture, Universitas Katolik Parahyangan, 1998 and BMus in Film Scoring, Berklee College of Music, 1997) as well as her practice-based research training in art (PhD in Art, RMIT University, 2014) contribute to a transdisciplinary practice that is often process-based and systematic.

She explores the intricate power dynamics of societal and geopolitical borders as interfaces, tackling these subjects both pragmatically and conceptually, through text, video, sound, painting, drawing, dance, installation, performance and public intervention.

Her works are represented in prominent public collections worldwide, including in the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Meanjin/Brisbane), Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Singapore Art Museum, and He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen, China). She has exhibited in numerous museums, film festivals and biennales,

including at the ICA (London), International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Underground Film Festival, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA Seoul), Espace culturel Louis Vuitton (Paris), FACT (Liverpool, as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2006) and Garage Projects (Moscow, as part of the 54th Venice Biennale). Her works have been shown in art fairs such as Art Stage Singapore, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Moving Image New York.

Tintin Wulia received the Australia Council for the Arts Creative Australia Fellowship 2014–16 and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2018. She is currently a Principal Investigator of the Swedish Research Council–funded project Protocols of Killings: 1965, Distance, and the Ethics of Future Warfare (2021–24) and the European Research Council–funded Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change/ THINGSTIGATE (2023–28).

Installation view of Tintin Wulia, Some Memory Prevails 2019 (foreground) and Liminal Death 2023 (on wall), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

CONTRIBUTORS CURATOR Andrew Tetzlaff

Wulan Dirgantoro

Mikael Johani

Andrew Tetzlaff is the Senior Curator of RMIT Culture and produces exhibition programming at RMIT Gallery, RMIT Design Hub Gallery and First Site Gallery. He has worked in university art galleries since 2007, engaging with visiting artists, artistsin-residence, academics and students to produce and deliver local and international projects. Tetzlaff has lectured in studio art, art history and theory, and art enterprise courses, and he has served on the board of BLINDSIDE artist-run space (2008– 17) and the Public Galleries Association of Victoria (2020–23). He holds a BA from Tufts University (2002), a BFA from SMFA (2002), an MFA and a PhD from RMIT (2006, 2023). His research interest is the application of material thinking and embodied aesthetics to the practices of curation, photography and art installation.

Wulan Dirgantoro is an art historian and curator based in Melbourne, Australia, whose main research areas are feminism and gender and memory, and trauma in Southeast Asia. Currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Art for the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, she has published widely in journal articles, exhibition catalogues and books, mainly on Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Dirgantoro is researching a project on historical violence and contemporary art in Indonesia and TimorLeste (ARC LP 210300068). She is also a member of 1965 Setiap Hari, a transnational research-relay collective.

Mikael Johani is a poet. His latest collection We Are Nowhere and It’s Wow was published by Post Press.

His poems, translations and essays have been published in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, including in to let the light in, The Poetry Project, The Book of Jakarta, On Relationships, Asymptote, The Johannesburg Review of Books, AJAR and Vice. He was a writer-in-residence in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program at RMIT in 2022. He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he organises the monthly spoken-word night Paviliun Puisi. He is a member of 1965 Setiap Hari, a collective dedicated to archiving and publishing stories from 1965 Indonesia.

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Ken Setiawan Ken Setiawan is Senior Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne, and the co-founder, with Tintin Wulia, of 1965 Setiap Hari. Born in Indonesia, Setiawan grew up primarily in the Netherlands, where she studied Indonesian language followed by an MA in Southeast Asian Studies and a PhD in Law. Her research interests include globalisation and human rights, as well as historical violence and transitional justice. She has widely published on the politics of human rights in Indonesia, including on the 1965 violence and Buru island, the largest site of political detention under the authoritarian New Order regime. Setiawan is the daughter of 1965 survivor Hersri Setiawan (1936–),

William Walters a writer, journalist and translator who joined the left-wing cultural organisation LEKRA (Institute of People’s Culture) in 1958 and served as general secretary of its Central Java branch until 1960. He subsequently became the permanent representative of the Indonesian National Committee to the Asia-Africa Writer’s Bureau in Colombo in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Following the events of 1965, Hersri was detained without trial for nine years, seven on Buru.

William Walters is Professor in Politics and Sociology at Carleton University, Canada.

His main research interests are secrecy and security, borders and migration, and mobility and politics. Recent publications include State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (Routledge, 2021), the coedited Viapolitics: Borders, Migration and the Power of Locomotion (Duke UP, 2022) and the co-edited Handbook on Governmentality (Edward Elgar, 2023). In 2017–22 he directed The Air Deportation Project, a multi-country inquiry (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) into the aerial geographies of forced removal and expulsion in and from Europe.

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Installation view, Tintin Wulia, (Re)collections of Togetherness – Stage 12 2007–23 (detail), in Tintin Wulia: Secrets, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

LIST OF WORKS

All works are courtesy of the artist, Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane, and BAIK ART, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Measurements are height x width x depth.

(Re)collections of Togetherness – Stage 12 2007–23 installation of 133 handmade passports installation dimensions variable Untold Movements – Act 1: Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland 2015 synchronised 32-channel sound installation, fabric installation dimensions variable A Thousand and One Martian Nights 2017 single-channel video installation with surveillance camera, telematic-twinned, 38 min 1 sec (looped) installation dimensions variable

Some Memory Prevails 2019 Papilio ulysses specimen, silver insect pin, split-shot sinker, nylon monofilament, hot-melt adhesive, acrylic mirror, acrylic monomer and powder, under glass dome 44.5 x 40 cm diameter Subtext – After Kawara’s Title, 1965 2019 installation of 68 paintings, acrylic on canvas installation dimensions variable December 2021 synchronised 3-channel digital video with 6-channel sound installation, 8 min (looped) installation dimensions variable

Memory is Frail (and Truth Falters) 2023 installation of 38 charcoal and graphite drawings on cotton paper, binoculars installation dimensions variable Letter to Mr J E England, Secretary of the Main Roads Commission, from an anonymous person, claiming a Russian employee of Main Roads is associated with Communists, 3 July 1930 reproduction on newsprint, printed 1 December 2023 Collection of Queensland State Archives, IID DR5371

Absence in Substantia: Density 2023 ink on paper nylon, polyester fibre 337 x 178 x 5 cm Liminal Death 2023 wall mural printed on phototex 433 x 670 cm

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EXHIBITION STAFF Manager RMIT Galleries Helen Rayment Senior Curator Andrew Tetzlaff Engagement Coordinator, Galleries Lisa Linton Exhibition Coordinator, Galleries Julia Powles Exhibition Assistants Michaela Bear, Jemima Penny, Louise Meuwissen, Celine Saoud Gallery Attendants Alex Bloom, Maud Freeman, Audrey Merton, Andari Suherlan, Melissa Viola Senior Production Coordinator Erik North Production Officer Tim McLeod Technical Production Coordinator Simon Maisch Production Assistants Bec Bartlet, Olivia Borghesan, Robert Bridgewater, Mason Cox, Yvette James, Pat Mooney, Jonty Ransome

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition Tintin Wulia: Secrets Curated by Andrew Tetzlaff RMIT Gallery, Melbourne/Naarm 5 December 2023 – 27 January 2024 Tintin Wulia: Secrets was produced

by RMIT Culture The exhibition is prepared in conjunction with Wulia’s artistic research project at the University of Gothenburg, 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.

RMIT Culture would like to acknowledge the collaborative partnership between exhibiting artist Tintin Wulia and exhibition curator Andrew Tetzlaff, who together with the broader RMIT Culture team, have created this exhibition.

Our warmest thanks to BAIK Art, Jakarta, and the University of Gothenburg for their support.

We appreciate all the art and educational institutions hat have encouraged Tintin as an artist, researcher and storyteller.

For their continued encouragement and guidance, Andrew Tetzlaff extends thanks to Helen Rayment, Manager RMIT Galleries and the broader Galleries team; Erik North, Senior Production Coordinator; Paula Toal, Head, Cultural and Public Engagement; Amy Harrington, Associate Director Partnerships; and Saskia Loer Hansen, Deputy Vice Chancellor and Vice President, International and Engagement.

The development of Memory is Frail (and Truth Falters) 2023 was made possible with the support of the Australian Film Institute Research Collection, managed by Elizabeth Marsden, Manager, Cultural Collections, and Olympia Barron, Curatorial Officer, to whom Tintin and Andrew offer sincere thanks.

Catalogue coordinator: Lisa Linton Contributing writers: Wulan Dirgantoro, Mikael Johani, Ken Setiawan, Andrew Tetzlaff and William Walters Copy editor: Linda Michael Design: Zennie McLoughlin Exhibition photography: Christian Capurro

ISBN 978-0-6480529-2-0 This catalogue is copyright. Apart from fair dealings for the purpose of research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrievable system or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.

The views and opinions expressed in this catalogue are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RMIT University.

RMIT Gallery RMIT University 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne/Naarm Victoria 3000, Australia www.rmitgallery.com @rmitgalleries +61 3 9925 1717 galleries@rmit.edu.au

Front and back cover image: Tintin Wulia, A Thousand and One Martian Nights 2017 (still).

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